ve not been
able to rouse myself to the effort of writing to you.... You will ask if
my baby affords me no employment? Yes, endless in prospect and theory,
dear H----; but when people talk of a baby being such an "occupation,"
they talk nonsense, such an _idleness_, they ought to say, such an
interruption to everything like reasonable occupation, and to any
conversation but baby-talk....

You ask of my society. I have none whatever: we live six miles from
town, on a road almost impracticable in the fairest as well as the
foulest weather, and though people occasionally drive out and visit me,
and I occasionally drive in and return their calls, and we
semi-occasionally, at rare intervals, go in to the theatre, or a dance,
I have no friends, no intimates, and no society.

Were I living in Philadelphia, I should be but little better off; for
though, of course, there, as elsewhere, the materials for good society
exist, yet all the persons whom I should like to cultivate are
professionally engaged, and their circumstances require, apparently,
that they should be so without intermission; and they have no time, and,
it seems, but little taste for social enjoyment.

There is here no rich and idle class: there are two or three rich and
idle individuals, who have neither duties nor influence peculiar to
their position, which isolates without elevating them; and who, as might
be expected in such a state of things, are the least respectable members
of the community. The only unprofessional man that I know in
Philadelphia (and he studied, though he does not practice, medicine) who
is also a person of literary taste and acquirement, has lamented to me
that all his early friends and associates having become absorbed in
their several callings, whenever he visits them he feels that he is
diverting them from the labor of their lives, and the earning of their
daily bread.

No one that I belong to takes the slightest interest in literary
pursuits; and though I feel most seriously how desirable it is that I
should study, because I positively languish for intellectual activity,
yet what would under other circumstances be a natural pleasure, is apt
to become an effort and a task when those with whom one lives does not
sympathize with one's pursuits.... Without the stimulus of example,
emulation, companionship, or sympathy, I find myself unable to study
with any steady purpose; however, in the absence of internal vigor, I
have borrowed ext