full of wholesome outdoor work, and with no room for those
listless moments of depression and boredom, and of wondering
what you will do next, that leave wrinkles round a pretty
woman's eyes, and are not unknown even to the most brilliant.
But while admiring my neighbour, I don't think I shall ever try
to follow in her steps, my talents not being of the energetic
and organising variety, but rather of that order which makes
their owner almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of poetry
and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and, sitting on
a willow trunk beside a little stream, forget the very
existence of everything but green pastures and still waters,
and the glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields.
And it would make me perfectly wretched to be confronted
by ears so refractory as to require boxing.

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it
is on these occasions that I realise how absolutely alone each
individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk
(generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to
wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's
own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.
I am speaking of comparative strangers, people who are forced
to stay a certain time by the eccentricities of trains,
and in whose presence you grope about after common interests
and shrink back into your shell on finding that you have none.
Then a frost slowly settles down on me and I grow each minute more
benumbed and speechless, and the babies feel the frost in the air
and look vacant, and the callers go through the usual form of
wondering who they most take after, generally settling the question
by saying that the May baby, who is the beauty, is like her father,