She was twenty-one; pretty, buxom, like her mother, modern, with (to me) a pathetic touch of mid-Victorian softness and sentimentality; independent in outward action, what we call "open-air"; yet an anomaly, fond at once of games and babies.

I have seen her in the morning tearing away across country by the side of her father, the most passionate and reckless rider to hounds in the county, and in the evening I have come across her, a pretty mass of pink flesh and muslin--no, it can't be muslin--say chiffon--anyhow, something white and filmy and girlish--curled up on a sofa and absorbed in a novel of Mrs.Henry Wood, borrowed, if one could judge by the state of its greasy brown paper cover, from the servants' hall.

I confess that, though to her as to her brother I was "Uncle Duncan," and loved her as a dear, sweet English girl, I found her lacking in spirituality, in intellectual grasp, in emotional distinction.

I should have said that she was sealed by God to be the chaste, healthy, placid mother of men.
She was forever laughing--just the spontaneous laughter of the gladness of life.
On the last afternoon of her existence she came to see me, bringing me a basket of giant strawberries from her own particular bed.

We had tea in the garden, and with her young appetite she consumed half the fruit she had brought.