me,--if, as they say, it be necessary for me to go at
all. As to living there by myself, it seems to me to be
impossible. You know the place well, and can you imagine
me there all alone, surrounded by Scotch men and women,
who, of course, must hate and despise me, afraid of every
face that I see, and reminded even by the chairs and
tables of all that is past? I have told papa that I know I
shall be back at Saulsby before the middle of the month.
He frets, and says nothing; but he tells Violet, and then
she lectures me in that wise way of hers which enables her
to say such hard things with so much seeming tenderness.
She asks me why I do not take a companion with me, as I am
so much afraid of solitude. Where on earth should I find a
companion who would not be worse than solitude? I do feel
now that I have mistaken life in having so little used
myself to the small resources of feminine companionship. I
love Violet dearly, and I used to be always happy in her
society. But even with her now I feel but a half sympathy.
That girl that she has with her is more to her than I am,
because after the first half-hour I grow tired about her
babies. I have never known any other woman with whom I
cared to be alone. How then shall I content myself with a
companion, hired by the quarter, perhaps from some
advertisement in a newspaper?

No companionship of any kind seems possible to me,--and
yet never was a human being more weary of herself. I
sometimes wonder whether I could go again and sit in
that cage in the House of Commons to hear you and other
men speak,--as I used to do. I do not believe that any
eloquence in the world would make it endurable to me. I
hardly care who is in or out, and do not understand the
things which my cousin Barrington tells me,--so long does
it seem since I was in the midst of them all. Not but that
I am intensely anxious that you should be back. They tell
me that you will certainly be re-elected this week, and
that all the House will receive you with open arms. I
should have liked, had it been possible, to be once more
in the cage to see that. But I am such a coward that I did
not even dare to propose to stay for it. Violet would have
told me that such manifestation of interest was unfit for
my condition as a widow. But in truth, Phineas, there is
nothing else now that does interes