To-morrow I act Mrs. Haller, Thursday Lady Teazle, and Friday
Bianca again; Saturday is a blessed holiday.... I have finished
Smith's "Virginia," which I found rather tiresome toward the end. I
have finished Harriet Martineau's political-economy story, which I
liked exceedingly. I am reading a small volume of Brewster's on
"Natural Magic," which entertains me very much; but I am dreadfully
cramped for time, and my poor mind goes like a half-tended garden,
which every now and then makes me feel sad.

You would have been pleased, dear H----, if you had heard
Washington Irving's answer to me the other day when, in talking
with him of my profession and my distaste for it, I complained of
the little leisure it left me for study and improving myself, for
reading, writing, and the occupations that were congenial to me.
"Well," he said, "you are living, you are seeing men and things,
you are seeing the world, you are acquiring materials and heaping
together observations and experience and wisdom, and by and by,
when with fame you have acquired independence and retire from these
labors, you will begin another and a brighter course with matured
powers. I know of no one whose life has such a promise in it as
yours." Oh! H----, I almost felt hopeful while he spoke so to
me....

[Alas! my kind friend was no prophet. Not many months after, sitting by
him at a dinner-party in New York, he said to me, "So I hear you are
engaged to be married, and you are going to settle in this country.
Well, you will be told that this country is like your own, and that
living in it is like living in England: but do not believe it; it is no
such thing, it is nothing of the sort; which need not prevent your being
very happy here if you make the best of things as you find them. Above
all, whatever you do, don't become a creaking door." "What's that?"
asked I, laughing. He then told me that his friend Leslie, the painter,
who was, I believe, like his contemporary and charming rival artist,
Gilbert Stewart Newton, an American by birth, had married an
Englishwoman, whom he had brought out to America, "but who," said
Irving, "worried and tormented his and her own life out with ceaseless
complaints and comparisons, and was such a nuisance that I used to call
her 'the creaking door.'"]

Good-by, and God bless you, dearest H----.