u, nor need
you be for a moment nervous or uncomfortable from the idea that we
shall receive or treat you otherwise than as one of ourselves. I
have left my mother and my aunt in the room which is to be yours,
devising and arranging matters for you. It is a very small roost,
dear H----, but it is the only spare room in our house, and
although it is three stories up, it is next to mine, and I hope
good neighborhood will atone for some deficiencies. With regard to
interfering with the routine or occupations of the family, they are
of a nature which, fortunately for your scruples, renders that
impossible. There is but one thing in your letter which rather
distressed me: you allude to the inconveniences of a woman
traveling in mail coaches in December, and I almost felt, when I
read the sentence, what my aunt Dall told me after I had requested
you to come to us now, that it was a want of consideration in me to
have invited you at so ungenial a season for traveling. I had one
reason for doing so which I hope will excuse the apparent
selfishness of the arrangement. Toward the end of the spring I
shall be leaving town, I hope to come nearer your land, and the
beginning of our spring is seldom much more mild and inviting or
propitious for traveling than the winter itself. Then, too, the
early spring is the time when our engagements are unavoidably very
numerous; to decline going into society is not in my power, and to
drag you to my balls (which I love dearly) would, I think, scarce
be a pleasure to you (whom I love more), and to go to them when I
might be with you would be to run the risk of destroying my taste
for the only form of intercourse with my fellow-creatures which is
not at present irksome to me. Think, dear H----, if ceasing to
dance I should cease to care for universal humanity--indeed, take
to hating it, and become an absolute misanthropist! What a risk!

I have heard nothing more of or from John, but the newspaper
reports of the proceedings are rather more favorable than they have
been, though I fear one cannot place much reliance on them. I do
not know how the papers you see speak of the aspect of affairs in
England at this moment; the general feeling seems to be one of
relief, and that, whatever apprehensions may have been entertained