And there is this I must say, that all men do not need wives to toast their slippers or to serve their meals piping hot, or even to smooth the wrinkles, although I confess that there’s an appeal in this last.  Some of us need wives for inspiration, for spiritual and mental uplift, for the word of cheer when our hearts are weary—­for the strength which believes in our strength—­one doesn’t exactly think of Juliet as toasting slippers, or of Rosalind, or of Portia, yet such women never for one moment failed their lovers.

My Cousin Patty says that work will do you good, and we have great arguments.  I have told her of you, not everything, because there are some things which are sacred.  But I have told her that life for me, since I have known you, has taken on new meanings.

She glories in your independence and wants to know you.  Some day, it is written, I am sure, that you two shall meet.  In some things you are much alike—­in others utterly different, with the differences made by heredity and environment.

My little Cousin Patty is the composite of three generations.  Amid her sweets and spices, she is as domestic as her grandmother, but her mind sweeps on to the future of women in a way which makes me gasp.

Politics are the breath of her life.  She comes of a long line of statesmen, and having no father or brother or husband to uphold the family traditions of Democracy, she upholds them herself.  She is intensely interested just now in the party nominations.  A split among the Republicans gives her hope of the election of the Democratic candidate.  She’s such a feminine little creature with her soft voice and appealing manner, with her big white aprons covering her up, and curling wisps of black hair falling over her little ears, that the contrasts in her life are almost funny.  In our evenings over the little white boxes, we mix questions of State Rights and Free Trade with our bridal decorations, and it seems to me that I shall never again go to a wedding without a vision of my little Cousin Patty among her orange blossoms, laying down the law on current politics.

The negro question in Cousin Patty’s mind is that of the Southerner of the better class.  It isn’t these descendants of old families who hate the negro.  Such gentlefolk do not, of course, want equality, but they want fair treatment for the weaker race.  Find me a white man who raves with rabid prejudice against the black, and I will show you one whose grandfather belonged not to the planter but to the cracker class, or a Northerner grafting on Southern Stock.  Even in slave times there was rancor between the black man and what he called “po’ white trash” and it still continues.

The picture of the little bronze boy with his crown of roses lies on my desk.  I should like much to sit with you on the bench beneath the hundred-leaved bush.  What things I should have to say to you!  Things which I dare not write, lest you never let me write again.