with windows all round giving the most
lovely view. Opposite the door is a beautiful old cedar, which I used
to love to climb as a child, and should now if I had my own way. Its
lower branches dip down to the grass and make the most lovely bridge to
the old trunk. On the opposite side of the lawn there's another huge
tree; hardly anyone knows what it is, but it's a Spanish maple really--
such a lovely thing, all shining silver leaves on dark stems. I used to
look from one to the other and think that they looked like youth and
age, and summer and winter, and all sorts of poetical things like that.

On the south side there is another entrance leading down to the terrace
by a long flight of stone stairs, the balustrades of which are covered
by a tangle of clematis and roses. When I come walking down those steps
and see the peacock strutting about in the park, and the old sundial,
and the row of beeches in the distance, I feel a thrill of something
that makes me hot and cold and proud and weepy all at the same time.
Father says he feels just the same, in a man-ey way, of course, and that
it is much the same thing as patriotism--love of the soil that has come
down to you from generations of ancestors, and that it's a right and
natural feeling and ought to be encouraged. I know it is in him, for he
will deny himself anything and everything to keep the place in order and
give his tenants a good time, but--Resolution number two--I, Una
Sackville, solemnly vow to speak the plain truth about my own feelings
in this book, and not cover them up with a cloak of fine words--I think
there's a big sprinkling of conceit in my feelings. I _do_ like being
the Squire's daughter, and having people stare at me as I go through the
town, and rush about to attend to me when I enter a shop. Ours is only
a little bit of a town, and there is so little going on that people take
an extra special interest in us and our doings. I know some of the
girls quite well--the vicar's daughter and the doctor's, and the Heywood
girls at the Grange, and I am always very nice to them, but I feel all
the time that I am being nice, and they feel it too, so we never seem to
be real friends. Is that being a snob, I wonder? If it is, it's as
much their fault as mine, because they are quite different to me from
what they are to each other--so much more polite and well-behaved.

I spend the mornings with father, and the afternoons with mother. At
first she