Dolly laughed. 'I'll never do anything again that makes Kitty unhappy,' she said. 'But I do like the feeling--' she made a movement with her arms as though they were wings--'oh, I _like_ the feeling of having room!' _September 30th._ The weather is better again, and there has been a pause in our strivings. Mrs. Barnes and I have drifted, tired both of us, I resting in that refuge of the weak, the putting off of making up my mind, back into talking only of the situation and the view. If Mrs. Barnes were either less good or more intelligent! But the combination of non-intelligence with goodness is unassailable. You can't get through. Nothing gets through. You give in. You are flattened out. You become a slave. And your case is indeed hopeless if the non-intelligent and good, are at the same time the victims, nobly enduring, of undeserved misfortune. _Evening._ A really remarkable thing happened to-day: I've had a prayer answered. I shall never dare pray again. I prayed for a man, any man, to come and leaven us, and I've got him. Let me set it down in order. This afternoon on our walk, soon after we had left the house and were struggling along against gusts of wind and whirling leaves in the direction, as it happened, of the carriage road up from the valley, Dolly said, 'Who is that funny little man coming towards us?' And I looked, and said after a moment in which my heart stood still--for what had _he_ come for?--'That funny little man is my uncle.' There he was, the authentic uncle: gaiters, apron, shovel hat. He was holding on his hat, and the rude wind, thwarted in its desire to frolic with it, frisked instead about his apron, twitching it up, bellying it out; so that his remaining hand had all it could do to smooth the apron down again decorously, and he was obliged to carry his umbrella pressed tightly against his side under his arm. 'Not your uncle the Dean?' asked Mrs. Barnes in a voice of awe, hastily arranging her toque; for a whiff of the Church, any whiff, even one so faint as a curate, is as the breath of life to her. 'Yes,' I said, amazed and helpless. 'My Uncle Rudolph.' 'Why, he might be a German,' said Dolly, 'with a name like that.' 'Oh, but don't say so to him!' I cried. 'He has a perfect _horror_ of Germans--' And it was out before I remembered, before I could stop it. Good heavens, I thought; good heavens. I looked sideways at Mrs. Barnes. She was, I am afraid, very red. So I plunged in again, eager to reassure her. 'That is to say,' I said, 'he used to have during the war. But of course now that the war is over it would be mere silliness--nobody minds now--nobody _ought_ to mind now--' My voice, however, trailed out into silence, for I knew, and Mrs. Barnes knew, that people do mind.