The worst that can be said of Delia is that numbers of people whom she doesn’t care a button about call her a dear. At least that is the worst I can think of. As to Thalia, I had a note from her yesterday in which she spelled my name wrong. This after two years of notes. It may have been an accident; but much as I love Thalia I am disposed--this morning--to think that there is somewhere in her a defect obscure, elementary, which matches this. What is the worst they know of me? I have not the least idea, but I am prepared--this morning--to hope it is something rather bad. The fact is that here in our remote and arbitrary and limited conditions we are rather like a colony in a lighthouse; we have nothing but ourselves and each other, and we grow overwrought, over-sensitive to the personal impression. I suppose that is what has produced, has at least aggravated, cases like Tryphena’s. It is a thing to be on one’s guard against. I quite see that if my own symptoms increase I shall shortly arrive at the point of being unable to endure the sight of many persons superior to myself; which is illogical and ridiculous. CHAPTER XIX I was congratulating the hydrangea this morning on its delightful attitude toward life. This is no virtue of the hydrangea’s; it is a thing conferred, a mere capacity, but how enviable! All through its youth and proper blossoming time, which is the rains, it has the pink-and-white prettiness that belongs to that period. When it is over, instead of acknowledging middle age by any form of frumpishness the hydrangea grows delicately green again; it retires agreeably, indistinguishably into leaves, a most artistic pose. That, too, passes in these sharp days when the sun is only gold that glitters, and the hydrangea, taking its unerring tone from the season, turns a kind of purplish rose, and still never drops a petal, never turns a hair. In the end the hydrangea will be able to say with truth that it has not died without having lived. Sooner or later I might perhaps have seen that for myself, but it was Cousin Christina who pointed it out to me. It is one of the subtler and more gratifying forms of selfishness to ask persons of taste to help you to enjoy your garden; and at no one’s expense do I indulge in this oftener than at Cousin Christina’s. She spends more time with me here under the pencil-cedar than any one else does, partly because I think she likes me a little and the garden a great deal, and partly because she has fallen, recently, upon very idle circumstances.