Father is an Evangelical, but my Aunt Constance is what the village people call a little ’high’ in her religion. She would like flowers and candles, too, in church, if daddy would have them, which he won’t, and she keeps the fast days, but unostentatiously. Yet she and father live in harmony and love, and only laugh a little at each other! But my cousin Eustace annoys me. He is so good and holy. He is short and thin and pale and vacillating, and wears overcoats and carries an umbrella. In fact, he is everything that his mother and father aren’t. Ross doesn’t get on with him, and finds him ’tiring.’ Daddy says he is a throwback. I asked Eustace once if one of his ancestors could possibly have been a nun as he is so like a monk himself. He said I was simply abominable and wouldn’t speak to me all day. In the evening he said he was sorry, as quite obviously I didn’t know what I was talking about. Naturally I wouldn’t speak to him then. Such a way to apologise! Nannie was our old nurse, but since mother died she has been housekeeper. She is a comfortable kind of person. Any one who is tired, or cold, or hurt, or hungry, or very small is always Nannie’s ’lamb,’ though how the radiant six-foot-one and still-growing Ross can come under that category I don’t know, unless it’s because he’s always hungry. But he has ever been, and is, and will remain, her ’lamb.’ Father is Uncle Jasper’s brother and not an easy person to explain. He is a handsome, great tall thing, and a mixture of Dante and horses, dogs, humility, sport, and autocracy, but he is most adorable and has a divine sense of humour. Aunt Constance says he is a mystic, but I don’t know what she means. I have never been able to understand how he came to be a parson at all, for every inch of him is soldier. He has got a temper, too, only he doesn’t lose it when most people lose theirs. He’s dreadfully difficult about some things. He is so fastidious about clothes, especially mine. I think his eyes must magnify like a shaving-glass. He sees holes which are perfectly invisible to me. There is in me a certain carelessness about the things that show (I _must_ be perfect underneath), but a button off my shoe doesn’t really worry me unless the shoe comes off. A jag in my tweeds leaves me cold, and the moral aspect of a hole in my glove doesn’t weigh with me at all. Besides, as I said to father one day when I was being rowed,— ’If I have a _hole_ in my skirt it would appear as if I had just torn it, but if I have a darn it would look like premeditated poverty.’