F.R.

[107] “The Silence of Dean Maitland,” by Maxwell Grey.

    Lady Russell to Lady Georgiana Peel

    DUNROZEL, HASLEMERE, SURREY, September 9 [1887]

...  Your account of the Queen and her visit interested us much....  I often wish she could ever know all my gratitude to her and the nation for the unspeakable blessing and happiness Pembroke Lodge has been, and is; joys and sorrows, hopes fulfilled, and hopes faded and crushed, chances and changes, and memories unnumbered, are sacredly bound up with that dear home.  Will it ever be loved by others as we have loved it?  It seems impossible....

    Lady Russell to Lady Charlotte Portal

    DUNROZEL, HASLEMERE, September 12, 1887

DEAREST LOTTY,—­I don’t think I am writing because your clock is on the stroke of Sixty-three, for these clocks of ours become obtrusive, and the less they are listened to the better for our spirits.  I wonder whether it’s wrong and unnatural not to rejoice in their rapid movements as regards myself.  I often think so.  There is so much, or rather there are so many, oh, so many! to go to when it has struck for the last time, and the longing and the yearning to be with them is so unspeakable—­and yet, dear Lotty, I cling to those here, not less and less, but more and more, as the time for leaving them draws nearer.  God grant you many and many another birthday of happiness, as I trust this one is to you and your home....  Your letter was an echo of much that we had been saying to one another, as we read our novel—­not only does nobody, man or even woman, see every change and know its meaning in the human countenance, and interpret rightly the slight flush, the hidden tremor, the shade of pallor, the faint tinge, etc.; but we don’t think there are perceptible changes to such an extent except in novels....  I think a great evil of novels for girls, mingled with great good, is the false expectation they raise that somebody will know and understand their every thought, look, emotion....  How glad I am that you have a rival baby to worship—­ours is beyond all praise—­oh, so comical and so lovely in all his little ways and words....

    Your most affectionate sister,

    F.R.

    Lady Russell to Lady Georgiana Peel

    PEMBROKE LODGE, November 28, 1887

...  We have been having such a delightful visit from Lotty ... we did talk; and yet it seems as if all the talk had only made me wish for a great deal more.  Books and babies and dress and almsgiving and amusements and the nineteenth century, its merits and its faults, high things and low things, and big things and trifles, and sense and nonsense, and everything except Home Rule, on which we don’t agree and couldn’t spare time to fight.  We did thoroughly agree, however, as I think people of