Then I sent the girls with Messrs F. and G. to “go round the stables,” and M. and Jem and I remained together.  Jem went to sleep (with one eye open) under the table, and the sun shone and made the roof very hot, and outside—­“The trumpets blew!”

It was an afternoon wonderfully like a Wagner opera, thickset with recurring motifs....

Frimhurst. June 15, 1891.

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The old editions of Dickens are here, and I have been re-reading Little Dorrit with keen enjoyment.  There is a great deal of poor stuff in it, but there is more that is first-rate than I thought.  I had quite forgotten Flora’s enumeration of the number of times Mr. F. proposed to her—­“seven times, once in a hackney coach, once in a boat, once in a pew, once on a donkey at Tunbridge Wells, and the rest on his knees.”  But she is very admirable throughout.

I’ve also been reading some more of that American novelist’s work, Henry James, junior,—­The Madonna of the Future, etc.  He is not great, but very clever.

Used you not to like the first-class Americans you met in China very much?  It is with great reluctance—­believing Great Britons to be the salt of the earth!!—­but a lot of evidence of sorts is gradually drawing me towards a notion that the best type of American Gentleman is something like a generation ahead of our gentlemen in his attitude towards women and all that concerns them.  There are certain points of view commonly taken up by Englishmen, even superior ones, which always exasperate women, and which seem equally incomprehensible by American men.  You will guess the sort of things I mean.  I do not know whether it is more really than the elite of Yankees (in which case we also have our ames d’elite in chivalry)—­but I fancy as a race they seem to be shaking off the ground-work idea of woman as the lawful PREY of man, who must keep Mrs. Grundy at her elbow, and show cause why she shouldn’t be insulted. (An almost exclusively English feeling even in Great Britain, I fancy.  By the bye, what odd flash of self-knowledge of John Bull made Byron say in his will that his daughter was not to marry an Englishman, as either Scotch or Irishmen made better husbands?)...

July 6, 1881.

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The Academy this year is very fine.  Some truly beautiful things.  But before one picture I stood and simply laughed and shook with laughing aloud.  It is by an Italian, and called “A frightful state of things.”  It is a baby left in a high chair in a sort of Highland cottage, with his plate of “parritch” on his lap—­and every beastie about the place, geese, cocks, hens, chicks, dogs, cats, etc., etc., have invaded him, and are trying to get some of his food.  The painting is exquisite, and it is the most indescribably funny thing you can picture:  and so like dear Hector, with one paw on little Mistress’s eye eating her breakfast!!!...