It is amusing to watch him with his daughters, for although he disapproves of almost every word that Drusilla says, yet his passion for intellectual activity makes him secretly far prouder of her than of Naomi, whom he loves truly enough, but is inclined rather to group with mere creatures of instinct. Naomi threw out signals of understanding at once and took me under her charge, as I have already shown. You leave it to me, she seemed to say, evidently looking upon me as a foreigner in need of help and instruction at every turn. Unmarried girls of twenty-nine, if they have not grown embittered (as they are too apt to do), can be very administrative and protective. The maternal feeling, I suppose. With Drusilla, whose blood circulates more in the brain, I have not hit it off so well, although we are quite friendly. She so clearly looks upon me pityingly as a trifler and in a sense an ignoramus (for I had never even heard of John), and she is not yet old enough to see that England and its needs can perhaps be as well, if not better, studied from abroad than when one is in the midst. The difference between Naomi and Drusilla is that Drusilla asks, Naomi gives. Not the least remarkable thing in this wonderful world in which we grope and have our being, is the amazing differences that can exist in the children of the same parents. With the exception of Frank, the family seems to be incorrigibly celibate. But of course at every moment lifelong decisions to be single are being overturned, and one never knows. Drusilla now, I feel, might easily follow some such remark as "Please pass the salt" with the statement, made equally coolly, that she was engaged. If so, it would probably be to a Fabian with long hair, a blue flannel collar, and a red tie, or some youthful artist whose genius carries with it a perpetual dispensation from soap and razor. All her friends seem to be young men of these two brands, who like drawing to be ugly and poetry to be Irish. I meet her now and then in St. James's Park with a retinue of them, and we stand on the bridge and exchange views of life for a few moments or draw each other's attention to the light over Whitehall and the colour of London. Then they move off, a little as if they were guests for the Last Supper, with their brown beards and blue collars, and Drusilla and I walk to Queen Anne's Gate together. They are all simple good fellows, in spite of their very patent atheisms and nihilisms and solemn vows to be married either without a ceremony at all or in a registry office; but I don't think our little Drusilla is for any of them. For this new comradeship between young men and young women is not making for marriage, especially among the bisexual, as to a certain extent most artists and revolutionaries are.