around Twickenham Town that I do not know, it is because they are not
knowable. I love people, and, being naturally sociable and not very
particular, I have had a perfectly grand time making acquaintances with
the high and the low and, the in-betweeners; and the sick and well, and
the dear and the queer, and the ancestrals and up-comers, and the rich
and the poor, and every other variety that grows; and now I am as
familiar with most of the family histories as the oldest inhabitant.
That's the nice part of living in a small place. Something depends on
you and you depend on all the rest of the town, but at home you're lost
in numbers and only a few know you're living. Here everybody knows,
also they know some things that perhaps had better be unknown. As for
talk, they are the best talkers on earth, and there's no subject under
the sun they won't talk about. It's an inheritance, Father says, and
has been handed down from ages past, and, though they don't read very
much, they can do more with a little knowledge than most learned people
with their information, and they make anything they mention interesting
from the way they mention it. I love to hear them, and I've heard a
good deal.

Dear, precious Miss Susanna in the secrecy of my bedroom gave me a
little talk a few nights ago, and said she hoped I wouldn't mind, but
as I was young and inexperienced she thought it her duty to tell me
that I must be careful and not too informal, for certain people
wouldn't understand; and that while the Holts were a very good,
respectable family, still they were not-- She stopped and coughed a
little, and of course I understood, but I pretended I didn't, and told
her they were perfectly healthy and I had had more fun with the Holt
children than with any in town, but if she preferred they should not
come to her house to see me I would just stop in theirs sometimes, as I
would not like them to think I was afraid to go with them. I wasn't,