most insulting in her
censure:--

MADAM,--Supposing that I was dealing not only with a woman of honor, but,
from her professions, with a Christian, I ventured in my note of the 18th
inst., to make an appeal to your conscience in support of the justness of
my demand of the four hundred dollars still due from you for your
portrait. By your last note I find you are disposed to take an advantage
of that circumstance of which I did not suppose you capable. My sense of
the justness of my demand was so strong, as will appear from the whole
tenor of that note, that I venture this appeal, not imagining that any
person of honor, of the least spark of generous feeling, and more
especially of Christian principle, could understand anything more than
the enforcing my claim by an appeal to that principle which I knew should
be the strongest in a real Christian.

Whilst, however, you have chosen to put a different construction on this
part of the note, and supposed that I left you to say whether you would
pay me anything or nothing, you have (doubtless unconsciously) shown that
your conscience has decided in favor of the whole amount which is my due,
and which I can never voluntarily relinquish.

You affirm in the first part of your note that, after due consideration,
you think the real value of the picture is four hundred dollars (without
the frame), yet, had your crop been good, your conscience would have
adjudged me the remaining four hundred dollars without hesitation; and
again (if your crop should be good) you could pay me the four hundred
dollars next season.

Must I understand from this, madam, that the goodness or badness of your
crop is the scale on which your conscience measures your obligation to
pay a just debt, and that it contracts or expands as your crop increases
or diminishes? Pardon me, madam, if I say that this appears to be the
case from your letter.

My wish throughout this whole business has been to accommodate the time
and terms of payment as much to your convenience as I could consistently
with my duty to my family and myself. As a proof of this you need only
advert to my note of yesterday, in which I inform you that I am paying
interest on money borrowed for the use of my family which your debt, if
it had been promptly paid, would have prevented.

And in another letter he says:--

"I completed your picture in the summer with two others which have given,
as far as I can learn, entire satisfaction. Yours