The initial difficulty--by no means a small one--of what I was to be called having been slowly overcome (myself objecting as strongly to the Uncle Kent which they seemed to favour as they did to the Kent pure and simple which I wanted), all went very smoothly, and the family quickly dropped company manners and showed me what it really was. Not that the difference was very marked, but a difference of course there always is--company manners being for the most part a kind of sandpaper that removes the asperities (and occasionally the attractions) of personality. They are all very affectionate, but at the same time they all have their idiosyncrasies and cherish them. There are (as one says) two boys and two girls; but the boys are twenty-seven and twenty-five, and the girls twenty-nine and twenty-one. Naomi, the eldest, is the quiet head of the house, for my stepsister has poor health and takes things easily, and it is understood that she must be saved from anxieties and trials. Naomi therefore is the buffer state not only between her mother and the kitchen but between her mother and the world. Brasilia when I first arrived was a Slade student, a suffragette, and beyond correction or even instruction on any point under the sun. She wore a badge bearing the words "Defiance, not Defence." Drusilla is very pretty, but Naomi, I think, is beautiful. It is, however, Drusilla who wins notice. Naomi's beauty is for a riper judgment, since the better you know her the more beautiful she is. I thought of Ceres directly I saw her, and the impression grows. If I were an artist I would paint her so. She has the steady level gaze that I think of as that goddess's: she loves all little helpless things, and all little helpless things love her; she leaves nothing quite where it is, but stimulates and nourishes it. And yet to compare Naomi with Ceres is not doing her full justice, for it takes no count of her sympathetic imagination or her readiness for fun. Ceres the goddess, I take it, might have been the dullest woman in real life. Naomi, although she could not be called clever and certainly is not witty, is so full of what, to save much language, one might call womanliness, and the best womanliness, as to suggest profound sanity. If I had to describe this gift in a single word, I should say acceptivity. Those of us who are born critical and exacting approach nothing quite simply: we disapprove or we approve, and in so doing lose not only time but equanimity. But to Naomi's serene, sane mind the world has to be accepted as it is, and therefore she is always the same. Not that she considers everything perfect, but she has an instinctive realisation of the inevitability of imperfection which keeps her contented--or at any rate prevents querulous discontent.