t-maids
call "something deep." My father acts the Stranger with me, which
makes it very trying to my nerves, as I mix up all my own personal
feelings for him with my acting, and the sight of his anguish and
sense of his displeasure is really very dreadful to me, though it
is only all about "stuff and nonsense" after all.

I must leave off writing; I am excruciated with the toothache,
which has tormented me without respite all day. I will inclose a
line to Mrs. K----, which I will beg you to convey to her.

With kindest love to all your circle, believe me ever yours,

F. A. K.

Thank you for your delicious French comic song; you should come to
London to hear how admirably I sing it.

Mrs. K---- was a Miss Dawson, sister of the Right Honorable George
Dawson, and the wife of an eminent member of the Irish bar. She was a
woman of great mental cultivation and unusual information upon subjects
which are generally little interesting to women. She was a passionate
partisan of Owen the philanthropist and Combe the phrenologist, and
entertained the most sanguine hopes of the regeneration of the whole
civilized world through the means of the theories of these benevolent
reformers. Except Queen Elizabeth, of glorious memory, I do not think a
woman can have existed who combined the love of things futile and
serious to the same degree as Mrs. K----. Her feminine taste for
fashionable society and the frivolities of dress, together with her
sober and solid studies of the gravest sort and her devotion to the
speculations of her friends Owen and Combe, constituted a rare union of
contrasts. She was a remarkable instance of the combination exemplified
by more than one eminent person of her sex, of a capacity for serious
study, solid acquirements, and enlightened and liberal views upon the
most important subjects, with a decided inclination for those more
trifling pursuits supposed to be the paramount interests of the female
mind. She was the dear friend of my dear friend Miss S----, and
corresponded with her upon the great subject of social progress with a
perfect enthusiasm of theoretical reform.

GREAT RUSSELL STREET, November 14th
DEAREST H----,

Thank you a thousand times for your kindness in consenting to come
to us. We are all very happy in the hope of having yo