I know what I would do if I were both poor and genteel--the gentility
should go to the place of all good ilities, including utility,
respectability, and imbecility, and I would sit, quite frankly poor,
with a piece of bread, and a pot of geraniums, and a book. I conclude
that if I did without the things erroneously supposed necessary to
decency I might be able to afford a geranium, because I see them so
often in the windows of cottages where there is little else; and if I
preferred such inexpensive indulgences as thinking and reading and
wandering in the fields to the doubtful gratification arising from kept-
up appearances (always for the bedazzlement of the people opposite, and
therefore always vulgar), I believe I should have enough left over to
buy a radish to eat with my bread; and if the weather were fine, and I
could eat it under a tree, and give a robin some crumbs in return for
his cheeriness, would there be another creature in the world so happy? I
know there would not.



JULY


July 1st.--I think that after roses sweet-peas are my favourite flowers.
Nobody, except the ultra-original, denies the absolute supremacy of the
rose. She is safe on her throne, and the only question to decide is
which are the flowers that one loves next best. This I have been a long
while deciding, though I believe I knew all the time somewhere deep down
in my heart that they were sweet-peas; and every summer when they first
come out, and every time, going round the garden, that I come across
them, I murmur involuntarily, "Oh yes, _you_ are the sweetest, you dear,