d, and not a
pretty kind of old-fashioned, it looks grand in a way. But when the
spring comes, and the bright days show up all the dinginess, poor
mother, how she does sigh!

'I would so like to have a pretty house,' she says. 'The curtains are
all so dark, you can scarcely see they're any colour at all, and those
dreadful heavy gilt frames to the mirrors in the drawing-rooms! Oh,
Alan'--Alan is father--'don't you think gran would let us refurnish even
the third drawing-room? I could make it a sort of boudoir, you know, and
I could have my own friends in there in the daytime. The rooms don't
look so bad at night.'

But father shakes his head.

'I'm afraid he wouldn't like it,' he says.

So I suppose even father gives in a good deal to gran.

Mums isn't a bit selfish. The brightest rooms in the house have always
been ours. They're two floors over the drawing-rooms, which are really
_very_ big rooms. We have a nursery, and on one side of it a
dressing-room--that's mine--and two other rooms, with two beds each for
the girls. We do our lessons in the study--a little room in front of the
dining-room, very jolly, for it looks to the front, and the street is
wide, and we can see all the barrel-organs and monkeys, and Punch and
Judys, and bands, when we're doing our lessons. I don't mean when we're
_having_ our lessons; that's different. My goodness! I'd like to see
even Serry try to look out of the window when Miss Stirling is there!
Miss Stirling's our governess. She comes, you know; she's not a
living-in-the-house one, and she's pretty strict, so we like her best
the way she is. But _doing_ our lessons is when we're learning them.
Most days, in winter anyway, we go a walk till four, or a quarter to,
and then we learn for an hour, and then we have tea; and if we're not
finished, we come down again till half-past six or so, and then we dress
to go into the drawing-room to mums.

She nearly always dresses for dinner early, so we have an hour with her.
The little ones, Serena and Maud, never have much to learn. It's Anne
and Hebe and me. We all do Latin-- I mean we three do. And twice a week
Miss Stirling takes Anne and Hebe to French and German classes for
'advanced pupils.' I'm not an advanced pupil, so those mornings I work
alone for two hours, and then I've not much to do in the evening those
days. And Miss Stirling gives me French and German the days that the
girls are at their music with Mrs. Meux, their music-teach