of women by insisting on having full time to study her protoplasms, snubbing and deriding all the officers who did not talk like Oxford dons.  Probably the E. E. would be the only people she would think fit to speak to.  Avice is the one to whom I feel the most drawn.  She is thoroughly thoughtful, and her religion is not of the uninfluential kind Mary describes.  Those distresses and perplexities which poor Isa affected were chiefly borrowed from her genuine ones; but she has obtained the high cultivation and intelligence that her Oxford life can give in full measure, and without conceit or pretension, and it is her unselfish, yielding spirit that has prevented me from knowing her sooner, though when not suppressed she can be thoroughly agreeable, and take her part in society with something of her mother’s brilliancy.  I think, too, that she would be spared, as Oxford does not agree with her, and a southern winter or two would be very good for her.  Besides, the others might come and see her in vacation time.  Could we not take both her and Isabel at least for the first winter?

19.—­A stormy wet day, the first we have had.  Poor Isa has made an attempt at explanation and apology, but lost herself in a mist of words and tears.  I suppose I was severe, for she shrinks from me, and clings to Avice, who has stood her friend in many a storm before, and, as Jane indignantly tells me, persists in believing that she is really sorry and wishes to be good.  She is very attentive and obliging, and my dear mother, who is in happy ignorance of all this uproar, really likes her the best of all the girls.

21.—­We have had a great alarm.  Last evening we went to the parish church; Horace Druce had been asked to preach, and the rain, which had fallen all the morning, cleared off just in time for the walk.  Emily, Margaret, two of her children, and I sat in the gallery, and Avice and Isa in the free seats below.  Avice had been kept at home by the rain in the morning, but had begged leave to go later.  Darkness came on just as the first hymn was given out, and the verger went round with his long wand lighting the gas.  In the gallery we saw plainly how, at the east end, something went wrong with his match, one which he thought had failed, and threw aside.  It fell on a strip of straw matting in the aisle, which, being very dry, caught fire and blazed up for a few seconds before it was trampled out.  Some foolish person, however, set the cry of ‘Fire!’ going, and you know what that is in a crowded church.  The vicar, in his high old-fashioned desk with a back to it, could not see.  Horace in a chair, in the narrow, shallow sanctuary, did see that it was nothing, but between the cries of ‘Fire!’ and the dying peal of the organ, could not make his voice heard.  All he could do was to get to the rear of the crowd, together with the other few who had seen the real state of things, and turn back all those whom they could, getting them out through the vestry.  But