sorry.

The people I love are always somewhere else and not able to come to me,
while I can at any time fill the house with visitors about whom I know
little and care less. Perhaps, if I saw more of those absent ones, I
would not love them so well--at least, that is what I think on wet days
when the wind is howling round the house and all nature is overcome with
grief; and it has actually happened once or twice when great friends
have been staying with me that I have wished, when they left, I might
not see them again for at least ten years. I suppose the fact is, that
no friendship can stand the breakfast test, and here, in the country,
we invariably think it our duty to appear at breakfast. Civilisation has
done away with curl-papers, yet at that hour the soul of the Hausfrau
is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her grandmother's hair; and
though my body comes down mechanically, having been trained that way by
punctual parents, my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for other
people till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been
taken out of doors and aired in the sunshine. Who can begin conventional
amiability the first thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage
instincts and natural tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable
and the Cross. I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never
thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed.

November 11th.--When the gray November weather came, and hung its soft
dark clouds low and unbroken over the brown of the ploughed fields and
the vivid emerald of the stretches of winter corn, the heavy stillness
weighed my heart down to a forlorn yearning after the pleasant things
of childhood, the petting, the comforting, the warming faith in the
unfailing wisdom of elders. A great need of something to lean on, and a
great weariness of independence and responsibility took possession of my
soul; and looking round for support and comfort in that transitory mood,
the emptiness of the present and the blankness of the future sent me
back to the past with all its ghosts. Why should I not go and see the
place where I was born, and where I lived so long; the place where I was
so magnificently happy, so exquisitely wretched, so close to heaven,
so near to hell, always either up on a cloud of glory, or down in the
depths with the waters of despair closing over my head? Cousins live in
it now, distant cousins, loved with the exact measure of love us