The universal unpopularity of domestic service proves that the duties of a woman are in themselves neither agreeable nor interesting. Where is the man in all the world who would exchange even the most laborious of his occupations for his wife's daily existence? The only considerations that can permanently reconcile human beings to unattractive labours is first the sentiment of loyalty--that such labours are performed for one who is loved and admired--and second the fine, noble old habit of submission. These incentives to duty, these helps to happiness, man has taken from woman by weakly shuffling off his mastership. I accuse man of having wilfully cast from him the noblest crown in the world--of having wrongfully abdicated. War has at least this merit that it forces him to drop the vulgar careless ease of the bourgeois and resume for the time at least those bold and vigorous virtues which made him woman's hero and her cheerfully accepted master. June 13. Life. It is a toy: a jingling bauble gay, That children grasp with wondering, wide-eyed pleasure; Soil it with too fierce use, and find their treasure But rags and tinsel, which at close of day Falls from their weary hands. It is a page Whereon the child scribbles unmeaning scrawls. Youth's glowing pen indites sweet madrigals. Man tells a history, and sad old age-- Seeing that all the space that he hath writ before But wrote in varying ways his folly large-- Sets "Vanity" upon the meagre marge. And last Time prints "The End" and turns it o'er. July 2. Portable Property. The Chinese pinks are in full bloom now. I have gathered pounds of them and arranged them in vases, and the mere outline of their feathery grey-green foliage, set with those fringed flecks of warm colour, makes existence seem an agreeable thing. The sound of children's voices outside, the smell of the cut grass, and the blue of the day, all seemed freshly sweet and pleasant because of the pleasure the freaked beauty of the bowls full of pinks give me. I am sorry for the people who don't care for flowers. The amiability they always awake in me is one of my most valued bits of secret property. That is the kind of possession that moth and rust cannot corrupt. It is safe from burglars, and even age does not wither one's satisfaction in such belongings. Most of my life I have been poor, as the world reckons poverty, but in reality I have owned more than many millionaires.