This morning the girls are all out on the beach in pairs and threes, the pupils being all happily shut up with their tutor.  I see the invalid lady creep out with her beach-rest from the intermediate house, and come down to her usual morning station in the shade of a rock, unaware, poor thing, that it has been monopolised by Isa and Metelill.  Oh, girls! why don’t you get up and make room for her?  No; she moves on to the next shady place, but there Pica has a perfect fortification of books spread on her rug, and Charley is sketching on the outskirts, and the fox-terrier barks loudly.  Will she go on to the third seat? where I can see, though she cannot, Jane and Avice sitting together, and Freddy shovelling sand at their feet.  Ah! at last she is made welcome.  Good girls!  They have seated her and her things, planted a parasol to shelter her from the wind, and lingered long enough not to make her feel herself turning them out before making another settlement out of my sight.

Three o’clock.—­I am sorry to say Charley’s sketch turned into a caricature of the unprotected female wandering in vain in search of a bit of shelter, with a torn parasol, a limp dress, and dragging rug, and altogether unspeakably forlorn.  It was exhibited at the dinner-table, and elicited peals of merriment, so that we elders begged to see the cause of the young people’s amusement.  My blood was up, and when I saw what it was, I said—­

“I wonder you like to record your own discourtesy, to call it nothing worse.”

“But, Aunt Charlotte,” said Metelill in her pretty pleading way, “we did not know her.”

“Well, what of that?” I said.

“Oh, you know it is only abroad that people expect that sort of things from strangers.”

“One of the worst imputations on English manners I ever heard,” I said.

“But she was such a guy!” cried Charley.  “Mother said she was sure she was not a lady.”

“And therefore you did not show yourself one,” I could not but return.

There her mother put in a gentle entreaty that Charley would not distress grandmamma with these loud arguments with her aunt, and I added, seeing that Horace Druce’s attention was attracted, that I should like to have added another drawing called ‘Courtesy,’ and shown that there was SOME hospitality EVEN to strangers, and then I asked the two girls about her.  They had joined company again, and carried her beach-rest home for her, finding out by the way that she was a poor homeless governess who had come down to stay in cheap lodgings with an old nurse to try to recruit herself till she could go out again.  My mother became immediately interested, and has sent Emily to call on her, and to try and find out whether she is properly taken care of.

Isa was very much upset at my displeasure.  She came to me afterwards and said she was greatly grieved; but Metelill would not move, and she had always supposed it wrong to make acquaintance with strangers in that chance way.  I represented that making room was not picking up acquaintance, and she owned it, and was really grateful for the reproof; but, as I told her, no doubt such a rule must be necessary in a place like Oxford.