as he
is doing what he would call "the correct thing," he is perfectly and
serenely content. The sixth and last is going to Surbiton to spend the
holidays with a mother and three sisters, and I think he is the most
virtuously employed of all. He will walk out alone, with a terrier dog,
before lunch; and after lunch he will go out with his sisters; and
perhaps the vicar will come to tea. But 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 is that my pocket is full enough to let me have a holiday on a
liberal scale, without thinking of small economies. I may give pennies
to tramps or children, or a shilling to a sexton for showing me a
church. I may travel what class I choose, and put up at a hotel without
counti