A WALK ABROAD Thyme Dallison, in the midst of her busy life, found leisure to record her recollections and ideas in the pages of old school notebooks.

She had no definite purpose in so doing, nor did she desire the solace of luxuriating in her private feelings--this she would have scorned as out of date and silly.

It was done from the fulness of youthful energy, and from the desire to express oneself that was "in the air." It was everywhere, that desire: among her fellow-students, among her young men friends, in her mother's drawing-room, and her aunt's studio.
Like sentiment and marriage to the Victorian miss, so was this duty to express herself to Thyme; and, going hand-in-hand with it, the duty to have a good and jolly youth.

She never read again the thoughts which she recorded, she took no care to lock them up, knowing that her liberty, development, and pleasure were sacred things which no one would dream of touching--she kept them stuffed down in a drawer among her handkerchiefs and ties and blouses, together with the indelible fragment of a pencil.
This journal, naive and slipshod, recorded without order the current impression of things on her mind.
In the early morning of the 4th of May she sat, night-gowned, on the foot of her white bed, with chestnut hair all fluffy about her neck, eyes bright and cheeks still rosy with sleep, scribbling away and rubbing one bare foot against the other in the ecstasy of self-expression.

Now and then, in the middle of a sentence, she would stop and look out of the window, or stretch herself deliciously, as though life were too full of joy for her to finish anything.
"I went into grandfather's room yesterday, and stayed while he was dictating to the little model.