Yours ever and always,
Emilia.

LETTER III.

Fletcher’shall, Graysmill,
July 26th.

What do you think stepped in with my bath this morning?  A long narrow letter sealed with a heart.  I kissed the blue stamp and spread the three dear sheets out on my pillow.  Oime, Constantia, how I love you!  But why write about me?  Why waste pen and ink wondering how I am?  Tell me about yourself, tell me all you do, and all you think; tell me how many different hats you wore on Wednesday, and how you misspent your time on Thursday; tell me of all the nonsense that is poured into your ears, of all the rubbish you read; tell me even how many times your mother wakes you in the night to ask if you are sleeping well.  I long for you so that the very faults of your life are dear to me, even those for which I most reprove you when you are near.

Let me see:  it is past midday with you; you and your mother are out walking.  I hear you both.

“Constance,” says Mrs. Rayner, “put up your parasol!”

“Thanks, mother,” you reply; “I like to feel the sun.”

“You’ll freckle.”

“Through this thick veil and all the powder?”

“You’ll freckle, I tell you.  Put up your parasol.”

“Oh, mother, do let me be!”

Here Mrs. Rayner wrenches the parasol out of your hands and puts it up with a jerk; you take it, heaving a very loud sigh, upon which your mother seizes it again and pops it down.

“Very well, be as freckled as you please; what does it matter to me, after all?  It’s so pretty to have freckles, isn’t it?  Please yourself!  Only I warn you that you’ll look like a fig before the year’s out!”

Oh, dear me, it seems I’m in good spirits to-day!  Why not, with your letter in my pocket?  I am sitting out of doors in the woods.  I love this place, apart from its own beauty; I like to think of my father out here in the open, dreaming his young dreams.  Indoors in the old house I am often miserable, with a misery beyond my own, remembering how he suffered once between those walls.

No, I am not really in good spirits, although there comes now and again a little gust of light-heartedness.  You know me.  For the rest, I hate myself, I am a worm.  The empire of myself is lost; I am sitting low on the ground, where my troubles laid me, letting what may run over me.  I hate myself both for my abject hopelessness and for my incapacity to take comfort at the hands of those about me.  But oh! the deadliness of their life is past description; they have neither breadth nor health in their thoughts.  I am not speaking of the old women; their lives are at an end; they sit as little children there, simple of heart; what they were I ask not, nor boots it now, for their day is done.  But George Fletcher and his family, and my various more distant relatives, and my neighbours far and near—­oh, I shall