It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

Sackville-West frames writing as a practical antidote to time’s erasure. Days “slip emptily by” unless they are fixed in words; experience, mood, and even the self vanish as quickly as they arrive. The image of “clap[ping] the net over the butterfly of the moment” suggests both beauty and fragility: the present is vivid but elusive, and writing is the means of capturing it before it escapes. Her final claim—that the writer “scores” by catching mental changes “on the hop”—casts authorship as heightened attentiveness and swift transcription, turning transient inner life into durable record.