How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.

Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us? - the one advantage of time!

Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and 1879.

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.