"Then there is my mother. She is two years older than my father, which didn't perhaps show when they were young, but it does now. A woman of sixty-three is so much more elderly than a man of sixty-one. At least it is so in this house. Mother has silver-white hair, and she stoops, and is getting infirm—more than many of her age; while my father is still slim and upright and active. He has iron-grey hair and never an ache or a pain, and he makes nothing of a fifteen-miles' walk."
"I sometimes think my mother is almost more like a grandmother in the house; so gentle and invalidish, and able to do so little. Yet nothing would go straight without her; and she and he are like lovers still; except that he has a sort of reverent way of looking up to her. He always calls her 'Mother,' and she calls him 'My dear!' Never anything else."
"Next comes Isabel, our eldest. She is thirty, and looks like forty. She has managed everything for the last ten years, and she is a dear good creature,—only rather fussy about little things. She counts herself tremendously severe with me, though she never can say 'No' when I coax; but then she always gives in 'only this once.' She is full of sense, and can't understand a joke by any possibility.
"Then follows Margot, poor dear! Four years younger than Isabel, and eight years older than me. Margot has a weak spine, and lies down a good deal; still she hates to be called an invalid, and never will talk about herself and her symptoms. So people don't get tired of Margot's invalidism. I don't think I should describe her as the model invalid of story books; and yet she is not what Miss Baynes calls 'the fractious sufferer of real life.' Sometimes she has depressed moods, but when she is happy, she has the sweetest face in the world. And even when she is depressed, she never gets into a temper."
"Last of all there is me—Dolly—the household pet and plague. I am not like Issy or Margot. Issy is substantial and slow; and Margot is tall and slim; while I am small and bony, but not a scrap delicate, and everything that I do is always done in a hurry. I have a great lot of fair hair—golden hair some call it—but the trouble of my life is a snub nose,—a real undeniable little snub. Nothing can hide or cure that. Issy's is too long, with a droop at the end, worse even than mine; but Margot has the sweetest little love of a straight nose, neither long nor short. If only I had a nose like hers, I should be perfectly happy."
"Well, no—not perfectly, perhaps; because I should want to be tall and graceful also. It would be so nice to carry one's head higher than other people, and always to be gentle, and calm, and dignified. I should wish to be like Lady Geraldine—"
"'While as one who quells the lions, with a steady eye serenely
She, with level fronting eyelids, passed out stately from the room.'"
"That would be delicious! I suppose most people's eyelids are level, and face the front; but it sounds distinguished. Mine, of course, are level, only they are always on the move, and I am afraid I haven't 'steady eyes serenely' quelling other people."
"O me, what nonsense I am writing! Is that the good of a journal—to show one more of one's real self?"
"I have done at last with regular lessons, and a daily governess. After the holidays, I shall be supposed to read history and French, and to practise regularly. But my plans always come to grief."