view. Opposite the door is a beautiful old cedar, which I used to love to climb as a child, and should now if I had my own way. Its lower branches dip down to the grass and make the most lovely bridge to the old trunk. On the opposite side of the lawn there’s another huge tree; hardly anyone knows what it is, but it’s a Spanish maple really—such a lovely thing, all shining silver leaves on dark stems. I used to look from one to the other and think that they looked like youth and age, and summer and winter, and all sorts of poetical things like that.

On the south side there is another entrance leading down to the terrace by a long flight of stone stairs, the balustrades of which are covered by a tangle of clematis and roses. When I come walking down those steps and see the peacock strutting about in the park, and the old sundial, and the row of beeches in the distance, I feel a thrill of something that makes me hot and cold and proud and weepy all at the same time. Father says he feels just the same, in a man-ey way, of course, and that it is much the same thing as patriotism—love of the soil that has come down to you from generations of ancestors, and that it’s a right and natural feeling and ought to be encouraged. I know it is in him, for he will deny himself anything and everything to keep the place in order and give his tenants a good time, but—Resolution number two—I, Una Sackville, solemnly vow to speak the plain truth about my own feelings in this book, and not cover them up with a cloak of fine words—I think there’s a big sprinkling of conceit in my feelings. I do like being the Squire’s daughter, and having people stare at me as I go through the town, and rush about to attend to me when I enter a shop. Ours is only a little bit of a town, and there is so little going on that people take an extra special interest in us and our doings. I know some of the girls quite well—the vicar’s daughter and the doctor’s, and the Heywood girls at the Grange, and I am always very nice to them, but I feel all the time that I am being nice, and they feel it too, so we never seem to be real friends. Is that being a snob, I wonder? If it is, it’s as much their fault as mine, because they are quite different to me from what they are to each other—so much more polite and well-behaved.

I spend the mornings with father, and the afternoons with mother. At first she had mapped out my whole day for me—practising, reading, driving, etcetera, but I just said straight out that I’d promised to go the rounds with father, and I think she was glad, though very much surprised.

“He will be so pleased to have you! It’s nice of you, dear, to 

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