m lustrous
brown to snowy white in these few years, or that she should be
tormented, as Mr. Feldwick says she is, with remorse lest she be to
blame for the miserable warping of her son, and the catastrophe of
Mimi's existence. She would be glad to come to Mimi's aid and that of
her grandchildren, but that Mimi never permits unless she is in
_extremis_, having, as she says, taken her lot with full warning from
Lady ----; and Mimi has a helper who asks nothing more than to succor
her from his own very moderate store--a fellow singer who met and loved
her in the days when she was free, and in these, her days of ignominy,
loves her honorably and hopelessly still, and devotes himself to any
service in her and her children's behalf that she will permit; a poor,
little, unknown, unsung Bayard, whose earthly happiness may be added to
those sadder wrecks of lives ruined by the theorizings of Lady ---- and
her co-vagrants."

What do you think of all this, Susie? Would you exchange love in the
bush for love among these "leaders of thought" in London? How, after
these wicked, cynic, dreary histories and encounters, I nestle into my
home and am so humbly grateful for its every little self-abnegation,
every straitness of bond, no less than for the unspeakable riches it
holds--that of being loved and beloving to one's heart's highest-heaped
and deepest-down-pressed measure.

Love from Ronayne and self to my dearest woman. All kindest regards to
the head of the house, and tender wishes that the new home in that
topsy-turvy region of the world may be as happy and, some day, as noisy
as that whence this journeys to you from

Lil.

18 STANFIELD GARDENS, }
March 12, 1876. }

And do I never, in these days, see anything of my cooperative friends?
Yes, something, but less since Miss Hedges went to Duesseldorf. Mrs.
Stainton came to us a good deal early in the winter, but a month ago
she was ordered off to Bournemouth for an obstinate cough, and the long
letters I get from her are fuller of personal and spiritual matters
than of references to her late co-associates. For she's done at last
what we had all been looking for--gone over to Rome--and one hears from
her now nothing but the Church: the Church's wisdom and peace,
allusions to the saints, speculations upon states of prayer, enthusiasm
for the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and fervent wishes that
all puzzled wayfarers may find what she has found--absolute conviction