in me, once broken, I can easily accommodate myself to the next change, which, however, I always pray may be the last.  My mother and myself had yesterday a serious, and to me painful, conversation on the necessity of not only not hating society, but tolerating and mixing in it.  She and my father have always been disinclined to it, but their disinclination has descended to me in the shape of active dislike, and I feel sometimes inclined to hide myself, to escape sitting down and communing with my fellow-creatures after the fashion that calls itself social intercourse.  I can’t help fancying (which, however, may be a great mistake) that the hours spent in my own room reading and writing are better employed than if devoted to people and things in which I feel no interest whatever, and do not know how to pretend the contrary.

I must do justice to my mother, however, for any one more reasonable, amiable, and kind, in this as in most respects, can not exist than herself; but nevertheless, when I went to bed last night I sat by my open window, looking at the moon and thinking of my social duties, and then scribbled endless doggerel in a highly Byronic mood to deliver my mind upon the subject, after which, feeling amazingly better, I went to bed and slept profoundly, satisfied that I had given “society” a death-blow.  But really, jesting apart, the companionship of my own family—­those I live with, I mean—­satisfies me entirely, and I have not the least desire for any other.

     Good-by, my dearest H——­; do not punish me for not writing sooner
     by not answering this for two months; but be a nice woman and write
     very soon to yours ever,

FANNY.

     P.S.—­I am reading the memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, la
     Grande Mademoiselle, written by herself:  if you never read them,
     do; they are very interesting and amusing.

The “Dick” mentioned in this letter was the nephew of my godmother, Miss A——­ W——­, of Stafford, and son of Colonel ——­, a Staffordshire gentleman of moderate means, who went to Germany and settled at Darmstadt, for the sake of giving a complete education in foreign languages and accomplishments to his daughters.  His eldest son was in the Church.  They resided at the little German court till the young girls became young women, remarkable for their talents and accomplishments.  In the course of their long residence at Darmstadt they had become intimate with the reigning duke and his family, whose small royalty admitted of such friendly familiarity with well-born and well-bred foreigners.  But when Colonel ——­ brought his wife and daughters back to England, like most other English people who try a similar experiment, the change from being decided somebodies in the court circle of a German principality (whose sovereign was chiefly occupied, it is true, with the government of his opera-house) to being decided nobodies in the huge mass of obscure, middle-class English gentility, was all but intolerable to them.