good-natured, and, of
course, when it comes to really vexing or hurting any one, she's sorry
too--for about a minute and a half!

And then there's Maud. It is very funny about Maud, the oddest thing
about us, though we are rather a topsy-turvy family. Maud is only eight
and a half, but she's the oldest of us all.

'She's that terrible old-fashioned,' mother's old nurse said when she
came to pay us a visit once, 'she's scarce canny.'

They call _me_ old-fashioned sometimes, but I'm nothing to Maud. Why,
bless you (I learnt that from old nurse, and I like it, and nobody can
say it's naughty to bless anybody), compared to Maud I'm careless, and
untidy, and unpunctual, and heedless, and everything of these kinds that
I shouldn't be. And yet she and I don't get on as well as Hebe and I do,
and in some ways even not as well as Anne and I do. But Maud and Anne
get on very well-- I never saw anything like it. She tidies for Anne;
she reminds her of things she's going to forget; she seems to think she
was sent into the world to take care of her big sister. Anne is big--at
least she's tall--tall and thin, and with rather smooth dark hair. My
goodness! if she'd had fluffy hair like us three middle ones--for even
mine is rather a bother, it grows so fast and is so curly--what _would_
she have looked like? She seems meant to be neat, and till you know her,
and go her all over pretty closely, you'd never guess how untidy she
is--pins all over, even though Sophy is _always_ mending her frocks and
things. And Maud is dark too, though her hair is curly like ours; she's
like a gipsy, people say, but she's not a bit gipsy in her _ways_--oh
dear, no!

We live in London--mostly, that's to say. We've got a big dark old house
that really belongs to grandfather, but he's so little there that he
lets us use it, for father has to be in London a lot. We're always there
in winter; that's the time grandfather's generally in France or Egypt,
or somewhere warm. Now and then, if he's later of going away than usual,
or sooner of coming back, he's with us a while in London. We don't like
it much.

That sounds unkind. I don't mean to be unkind. I'm just writing
everything down because I want to practise myself at it. Father writes
books--very clever ones, though they're stories. I've read bits, but I
didn't understand them much, only I know they're very clever by the fuss
that's made about them. And people wonder how ever he gets time to write
the