aken. Something has held me back--a
friendship, business, links which were only imaginary fetters, a host of
trivial unimportances masquerading in my mood of the moment as serious
affairs. So the summer has come and gone, and only for an all-too-brief
period have I "got away." Nor have I particularly enjoyed my respite
from the roar of omnibuses, the tramp, tramp, tramp of the crowded
pavements. Somehow or other the war has robbed me of my love of solitude
Somehow or other the peace and beauty and solitude of Nature still "hurt"
me, as they used to hurt me during the years of the great world tragedy
when, across the meadows brilliant with buttercups and daisies, there
used to come the booming of the guns not so very far away "out there."
So, in order to force my mood, and perhaps deaden remembrance of its
pain, I have taken along with me some human companion, only once more to
realise that, when with Nature, each of us should be alone. One yearns
to watch and listen, listen and watch, to lie outstretched on the
hill-side, gazing lazily, yet with mind alert, at every moving thing
which happens to catch one's eye. You can rarely do this in company. So
very, very few people can simply exist silently without sooner or later
breaking into speech or falling fast asleep. Alone with Nature books are
the only possible company--books and one's own unspoken thoughts.

"_Family Skeletons_"

The worst of keeping a "Family Skeleton" shut up in a cupboard is that
the horrid thing _will insist_ on rattling its old bones at the most
inopportune moments--just, for example, when you are entertaining to tea
the nearest local thing you've got to God--whether she be an "Honourable"
(in her own right, mark you!) or merely the vicar's wife! Whatever
family skeletons do or do not possess, they most assuredly lack _tact_.
They are worse than relations for giving your "show away" at the wrong
moment. If relations do nothing else, they at any rate sit tightly
together around family skeletons, if only to hide them from full view by
the crowd. But, of course, the crowd always sees them. The crowd always
sees _everything_ you don't want it to see, and is quite blind to the
triumphal banners you are waving at it out of your top-room window.
Sometimes I think that the better plan in regard to family skeletons is
to expose them to public view without any dissembling whatsoever, crying
to the world at large, and to the "woman who lives