“I have never been anywhere in my life,” she wrote, “where there are as many superlative comforts as there are at Kerncliffe, Araminta’s summer home in Virginia. My idea of comfort does not comprise the rich woman’s typification of luxury. I do not want things too fine--and I do not like a servant at my elbow. The presence of a great retinue of servants always hints of the undertaker.... Araminta is the best mixer I ever saw, and her ‘mixing’ is not affectation--it is greatness. For greatness finds its crucial test in knowing how to be common in the big sense of the word. If you are tried in the balance by a hair’s breadth of snobbery or of preference for the effeminacy of luxury, you are really further from being great than if you missed some of the finer points of art or the subtler qualities of kindness. “Nobody who wasn’t great in spirit could have chosen this breezy wooded knoll between two mountain ranges and built a house with as many delectable things about it as Kerncliffe. It is a great thing to know what you want and get it--so many of us do not--but Araminta is that way--she knows what she wants. “There is a living room forty feet long with a huge stone fireplace and wicker furniture, books and piano and a victrola--and doors and windows opening up vistas of tree tops and mountain and valley. There’s a dining room in blue and white--also with a big fireplace; there’s a sitting room for the boys with their own books and treasures and a big fireplace; there’s a kitchen that would do your soul good, where we all go and cook and eat if we want to; and there’s Sunset porch where we eat supper and watch the sun go down behind the mountain. “But up-stairs! Up-stairs there are four sleeping porches, and the birds in the tree tops are always calling, and far into the tranquil night with the accompaniment of just the faintest leaf whisper the whippoorwill trills a contralto serenade. “Just now a bob-white is about to drive me mad with his calling from the wheat field. I know he says ‘Judge White,’ because my brother, dead--long dead, long dead--seems somehow conscious of my spiritual altitude--my exultation in these lovely surroundings. “How I love the wild things that grow on the mountain and along the waysides in the cove. The blooming laurel, the huckleberry brush, the sweet climbing and vining things, and the smell of the hot sun on the dwarf pines. Every little growing thing seems intimate to me as though my soul had wandered here for centuries and had just run back to welcome me.