September 29. Here I live in mine own hired house, like the gentleman in the Bible,--who was it,--Paul? I hope only that he had one half the sense of entire possession that is mine. I look at Madge and Peter, busy in kitchen and garden, at Don, guarding the little iron gate, at the pony grazing beyond the stream, and I feel like a feudal lord. Especially do I feel so when we rout out the utensils in the kitchen,--knives, forks, skillets. Some of them surely antedate the feudal era; they were probably left by the cave men; their prehistoric shape, in its ancient British clumsiness, looks as if it might have archæological, if not practical, value. I shall use them for gardening; the forks will be a great help in wrestling with mother earth. Wrestle I do, indoors and out; I dare not be idle, and besides, I like to do these things. The Vicar's lady, passing, is shocked to see me scraping the putty off of my new-old diamond-paned windows; but somebody had to get it off; Madge couldn't, so why not I? Madge watches me working about, torn between her old attitude of maid at the Hall, with its fixed ideas as to what the gentry should do, and a something new that is slowly creeping into her mind. Throughout England, I am told, the gentry are doing things they used not to do,--for economy, for possible service to the country in its day of need. And it is slowly dawning on us all that its need is great. The Germans have been halted on the Marne, and we breathe more easily, but it is rumoured that they have brought their great siege guns up to Antwerp, and the poor Belgians are flocking over here in hordes. Madge, as she sees me toiling over my chintz curtains, and sees the bothersome things come down to my undoing, wants to know why I wished to come, quite by myself; why I didn't take lodgings somewhere,--it would be far less trouble. She doesn't understand in the least when I tell her that I cannot endure the irrelevance of lodgings, the antimacassars, the hideous bric-a-brac, the rooms packed full of horrors, where I cannot collect my mind. A home of your own is worth while, if only to keep it bare of human clutter; bad pictures intimidate me; ugly upholstery defeats my soul. Of provincial England I could say, if it weren't profane, all thy tidies and thy ugly reps have gone over me. The publicity of hotel or boarding house I cannot endure, nor the kind of tissue-paper life that one must live there. Not among gilt cornices but beside meadows and running waters I choose my lot. Your relatives are kindness itself in inviting me to stay with them, but just now I cannot bear kindness; I want people to be as cruel as God! Was I not lonely enough, after my own family had vanished into the silence; why did you come into my life only to leave me more alone?