as she brings more inches (for at eighteen one is able to form a pretty tolerable estimate of what one is going to be like for the rest of one's days)—never go donkey riding, or pig-nut hunting, or shrimp getting, any more—never love bull's-eyes, blackberries, and treacle tarts with the exceeding love that I knew for them of yore. I can even get over a gate without feeling any over-mastering impulse to vault or leap it. I can see Pepper taking an ecstatic roll in the grass without straightway longing to cast myself down and roll too.
The kitchen-garden has lost some of its charm in my eyes, for, thanks to my being so old, other affairs than gooseberries and currants occupy my mind, very much against my will. I am the eldest daughter at home now, and obliged to mind my morals and manners to a maddening extent; for every sin of omission and commission of my brothers and sisters is laid to my charge, and said to be the fruit of my example. It is dismal at the Manor House now many are away. Jack is in London. He is going to be a barrister, and I call it mean of him; for if he had only elected to be a fat gentleman farmer, I could have gone and lived with him in a little house, and been as happy——— Well! brothers never love their sisters quite as their sisters love them.
Milly has been "woo'd an' married an' a'" over a year and a half, and the family has not done gasping over the miraculous event yet. How it fell out that papa's unwilling consent was wrung from him; and how she never ran away at all, but stood up to be married, in a white satin gown and trimmings; and how papa gave her away with an ineffable hitch of his nose; and how up to the very last moment every one believed that he did not mean her to be married at all, but intended to turn the whole affair into a joke; and how he disappointed us all, as he always does—are not these things writ in the chronicles of the house of Adair?
