She has now changed her mind and is willing to follow her husband wherever he leads.  She is truly womanly, also she is still wearing the ring of the beau with whom she sought to bring Whythe to terms, and to please her worldly aunt.  But she will return the ring when it is proper to do so.  She is waiting to find out.

Elizabeth had more sense than I gave her credit for in refusing to live in the House of Eppes; but it’s either live there or not live with Whythe, and she evidently can’t live without him.  I’d hate love to make me lose the little gumption I was born with, and even my little knows no house is big enough for a son’s wife and a mother-in-law and three in-law sisters.  It won’t be a Home, Sweet Home, place when Elizabeth enters the Eppes house, and it will be nip and tuck as to who wins out, but that’s not my business.  I’m sorry for both sides, and thankful I’m not related to either.  Also, I will get out of the way as soon as possible, but until the picnic there doesn’t seem a possible way.

There is nothing in life that is not over if life is long enough, and my little love affair with Mr. Whythe Rives Eppes belongs to the past.  Elizabeth can have him any minute she wants, and unless actions do not speak louder than words she wants him right away, and he her.  I do not see how she is possibly going to stand his teeth.  Still, there are a great many things I do not understand in life.

The picnic is over.  By giving it I brought down a good deal of comment and criticism on my brown and curly head, but it does not matter.  Nothing except sin really matters if we have sense enough to see it.  I invited everybody in Twickenham Town that I liked to the picnic, and some few I didn’t, the latter being relations of those I did.  I don’t think a person ought to be punished for their relations, any more than being held responsible for them, and so I included them, too.  What I was criticized for was asking to the picnic quite a number of people who don’t usually go to the same places at the same time the Historicals go, and it made talk.  That night Miss Araminta Armstrong, on the quiet, told me she knew I meant to do right, but one had to use judgment in life, and it wasn’t well to put ideas in some people’s heads.  I told her I knew it, knew certain kinds of heads couldn’t take in certain ideas, one of which was that people could enjoy friendliness and outdoorness and a lunch they didn’t have to prepare for themselves, even if they were not high-born, and as the ones referred to did not have contagious diseases their presence wouldn’t prove dangerous and the Ancestrals needn’t be uneasy.  Also I told her I didn’t care for judgment as much as I ought, and if human beings knew one another better they might find they were not as unlike as they thought.  She didn’t say anything more.  Neither did any one else say anything to me.  To one another they said a good deal.