But I have no such duties before me.  I might, I suppose, go down to my sister Helen at the Somersetshire vicarage where she lives so full a life.  But the house is small, there are four children, and not much money, and I should only be in the way.  Charles would do his best to welcome me, but he will be in a great fuss over his Easter services; and he will ask me to use his study as though it was my own room, which will necessitate a number of hurried interviews in the drawing-room, my sister will take her letters up to her bedroom, and the doors will have to be carefully closed to exclude my tobacco smoke.

This is all very sordid, no doubt, but I am confronted with sordid things to-day.  The boys have just cleared off, and they are beginning to sweep out the schoolrooms.  The inky, dreary desks, the ragged books, the odd fives-shoes in the pigeon-holes, the wheelbarrows full of festering orange-peel and broken-down fives-balls:  this is not a place for a self-respecting person to be in.  I want to be mooning about country lanes, with the smell of spring woods blowing down the valley.  I want to be holding slow converse with leisurely rustic persons, to be surveying from the side of a high grassy hill the rich plain below, to hear the song of birds in the thickets, to try and feel myself one with the life of the world instead of a sordid sweeper of a corner of it.  This is all very ungrateful to my profession, which I love, but it is a necessary reaction; and what at this moment chiefly makes me grateful to it is that my pocket is full enough to let me have a holiday on a liberal scale, without thinking of small economies.  I may give pennies to tramps or children, or a shilling to a sexton for showing me a church.  I may travel what class I choose, and put up at a hotel without counting the cost; and oh! the blessedness of that.  I would rather have a three-days’ holiday thus than three weeks with an anxious calculation of resources.

April 8.—­I am really off to the Cotswolds.  I packed my beloved knapsack yesterday afternoon.  I put in it—­precision is the essence of diarising—­a spare shirt, which will have to serve if necessary as a nightgown, a pair of socks, a pair of slippers, a toothbrush, a small comb, and a sponge; that is sufficient for a philosopher.  A pocket volume of poetry—­Matthew Arnold this time—­and a map completed my outfit.  And I sent a bag containing a more liberal wardrobe to a distant station, which I calculated it would take me three days to reach.  Then I went off by an afternoon train, and, by sunset, I found myself in a little town, Hinton Perevale, of stone-built houses, with an old bridge.  I had no sense of freedom as yet, only a blessed feeling of repose.  I took an early supper in a small low-roofed parlour with mullioned windows.  By great good fortune I found myself the only guest at the inn, and had the room to myself; then I went early and gratefully to bed, utterly sleepy and content, with just enough sense left to pray for a fine day.