"I'M awfully excited to-day, because—NO, that is not the way to begin a journal. Margot advises me to start one, now I am eighteen. She has been advising it ever since my birthday, and this morning she gave me a charming little red book, with lock and key. So I suppose I really must do as she wishes."
"She says it will be a make-weight to my spirits when I am disposed to bubble over. Is there any harm in bubbling over? The world would be very dull if everybody's feelings were always to be kept hermetically sealed."
"No fear of mine being so, at all events. I'm not reserved, and I hate reserve, and I can't get on with reserved people. I like to say out just what I think. Of course there must always be some little inner reserves in everybody; at least I suppose so; but that is different from taking a pride in hiding what one feels, and in trying to seem unlike what one is."
"There's one good thing about a private journal! One can say exactly what one likes, and nobody's feelings are hurt. That is the only difficulty about always saying out what one thinks. Some people are so awfully thin-skinned, always taking offence. Of course the polite way of describing them is to say that they are 'sensitive'; but when I speak out what I think, I call them ill-tempered."
"I suppose the correct opening for a journal is a general statement about everything and everybody; a description of one's home and people and ways of life. But that would take a lot of time and patience. If I have the time, I haven't the patience."
"Still, something has to be written by way of introduction, though really I don't know why. If anybody ever reads what I write, it can only be one who knows all about everything already. And most likely my first entry will be my last."
"However—we live at Woodlands; not a big grand place, but the quaintest of old-fashioned houses in the quaintest of old-fashioned gardens. The house has wings and high gables and queer little windows. And the garden in summer has no horrid carpet-patterns or red triangles and blue squares, but is just one mass of trained sweetness—just Nature under restraint. That was what Edred said one day last spring."
"Craye is ten minutes off, down the hill, a funny old town in a hollow. Craye went to sleep a few hundred years ago, like the Kaiser Barbarossa; and unlike the Kaiser, it has never woke up since, not even once in a century. Yet Craye has a railway station, and actually it is not more by rail than an hour and a half from London. Only, as one always has to wait at least an hour at the Junction, the journey can't be done under two hours and a half."
"Now for the preliminary statement about our important selves."
"There is my father first; the dearest and kindest and best old father that ever lived. Not really old either, and so handsome and soldierly still. He can be sharp sometimes, but not to me. He spends lots of time in the clouds, and when he comes out of them, he does dearly love to spoil his Dolly. I am sure she loves to be spoilt."