then it will be home, and the girls will be proud of their brother,
and will have the dishes he likes, and he will have his father's
old study to smoke in. I am not sure that he is not the happiest of
all, because he is not only pursuing his own happiness.

But I have no such duties before me. I might, I suppose, go down to
my sister Helen at the Somersetshire vicarage where she lives so
full a life. But the house is small, there are four children, and
not much money, and I should only be in the way. Charles would do
his best to welcome me, but he will be in a great fuss over his
Easter services; and he will ask me to use his study as though it
was my own room, which will necessitate a number of hurried
interviews in the drawing-room, my sister will take her letters up
to her bedroom, and the doors will have to be carefully closed to
exclude my tobacco smoke.

This is all very sordid, no doubt, but I am confronted with sordid
things to-day. The boys have just cleared off, and they are
beginning to sweep out the schoolrooms. The inky, dreary desks, the
ragged books, the odd fives-shoes in the pigeon-holes, the
wheelbarrows full of festering orange-peel and broken-down fives-
balls: this is not a place for a self-respecting person to be in. I
want to be mooning about country lanes, with the smell of spring
woods blowing down the valley. I want to be holding slow converse
with leisurely rustic persons, to be surveying from the side of a
high grassy hill the rich plain below, to hear the song of birds in
the thickets, to try and feel myself one with the life of the world
instead of a sordid sweeper of a corner of it. This is all very
ungrateful to my profession, which I love, but it is a necessary
reaction; and what at this moment chiefly makes me grateful to it