acquaintances among her thoughts, any more than for fresh acquisitions among her friends; just as she liked faces to be familiar, so she liked ideas to be well-tested and proven before she admitted them to the privilege of her intimacy; the presence of strangers was an inconvenience; good manners forbade little jokes from which strangers were excluded, little allusive or reminiscent smiles in which they could not share. It followed, logically enough—although she enjoyed the small, carefully-chosen dinner parties she gave once a fortnight on summer evenings—that she was really happiest alone with her house and garden, because, as she said, one never knows anybody so well as one knows oneself, and even one’s most approved friends are apt to contradict or to disagree, or to advance unforeseen opinions; to disconcert, in fact, in a variety of ways impossible to the silent acquiescence of plants or furniture; and the one person whose constant companionship she would have chosen, had hitherto been absent. She was perfectly happy now as she lay waiting for eight o’clock and the beginning of the day, agreeable anticipations floating in her mind as her eyes wandered over the comfort of her room, from the chintz curtains to the bright stoppered bottles and silver on her dressing-table, from the small bookcase full of nicely-bound books to the row of photographs on the mantelpiece. All was very still. One of the curtains bellied out a little in front of an open window. From time to time a smile hovered over her lips, and once she gave a sigh, and moved slightly in her bed, as though the very perfection of her thoughts were giving her a deliciously uneasy rapture. But she never allowed herself to indulge for long in reveries which, however pleasant they might be, led to nothing practical. She knew that she had a great deal to see to that morning; and if all were not done in an orderly way, something would be forgotten. She stretched out her hand and took from off the table by her bed a memorandum book, fitted with a pencil and bound in green leather, across which was written in gilt lettering, “_While I remember it_.” With the pencil poised above the first fair page, she paused. Would it be better to execute her business in the village first, or to do what she had to do about the house? The village first, by all means; if any of the tradesmen made a mistake, there would be the more time to rectify their blunder. She began, in her mind, her journey up the village street, stopping at the stationer’s, the grocer’s, the fishmonger’s.