rt." He writes to Bentley:

Being twenty-one years old is really rather good fun. It is one of
those occasions when you remember the existence of all sorts of
miscellaneous people. A cousin of mine, Alice Chesterton, daughter of
my Uncle Arthur, writes me a delightfully cordial letter from Berlin,
where she is a governess; and better still, my mother has received a
most amusing letter from an old nurse of mine, an exceptionally nice
and intelligent nurse, who writes on hearing that it is my
twenty-first birthday. Billy (an epithet is suppressed) gave me a
little notebook and a little photograph frame. The first thing I did
with the notebook was to make a note of his birthday. The first thing
I shall do with the frame will be to get Grey to give me a photograph
of him to put into it. Yes, it is not bad, being twenty-one, in a
world so full of kind people. . . .

I have just been out and got soaking and dripping wet; one of my
favourite dissipations. I never enjoy weather so much as when it is
driving, drenching, rattling, washing rain. As Mr. Meredith says in
the book you gave me, "Rain, O the glad refresher of the grain, and
welcome waterspouts of blessed rain." (It is in a poem called "Earth
and a Wedded Woman," which is fat.) Seldom have I enjoyed a walk so
much. My sister water was all there and most affectionate. Everything
I passed was lovely, a little boy pickabacking another little boy
home, two little girls taking shelter with a gigantic umbrella, the
gutters boiling like rivers and the hedges glittering with rain. And
when I came to our corner the shower was over, and there was a great
watery sunset right over No. 80, what Mr. Ruskin calls an "opening
into Eternity." Eternity is pink and gold. This may seem a very
strange rant, but it is one of my "specimen days." I suppose you
would really prefer me to write as I feel, and I am so constituted
that these Daily incidents get me that way. Yes, I like rain. It
means something, I am not sure what; something freshening, cleaning,
washing out, taking in hand, not caring-a-damn-what-you-think,
doing-its-duty, robust, noisy, moral, wet. It is the Baptism of the
Church of the Future.

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday) Lawrence and Maurice came here. We were
merely infants at play, had skipping races round the garden and
otherwise raced. ("Runner, run thy race," said