later Records so interesting as the earlier. Not from any falling off of the recorder, but of the material.
The two dates of this Letter arise from my having written this second half-sheet so badly that I resolved to write it over again—I scarce know whether for better or worse. I go home this week, expecting Charles Keene at Woodbridge for a week. Please to believe me (with Compliments to Mrs. Wister)
Yours sincerely always
E. F.G.
CVIII. [249]
Woodbridge: Oct. 17, [1882.]
My dear Mrs. Kemble,
I suppose that you are returned from the Loire by this time; but as I am not sure that you have returned to the ‘Hotel des Deux Mondes,’ whence you dated your last, I make bold once more to trouble Coutts with adding your Address to my Letter. I think I shall have it from yourself not long after. I shall like to hear a word about my old France, dear to me from childish associations; and in particular of the Loire endeared to me by Sévigné—for I never saw the glimmer of its Waters myself. If you were in England I should send you an account of a tour there, written by a Lady in 1833—written in the good old way of Ladies’ writing, without any of the
smartness, and not too much of the ‘graphic’ of later times. Did you look at Les Rochers, which, I have read, is not to be looked into by the present owner? [250a]
Now for my ‘Story, God bless you,’ etc., you may guess where none is to be told. Only, my old Housekeeper here has been bedded for this last month, an illness which has caused her great pain, and at one time seemed about to make an End of her. So it may do still: but for the last few days she has suffered less pain, and so we—hope. This has caused much trouble in my little household, as you may imagine—as well on our own account, as on hers.
Mowbray Donne wrote me that his Edith had been seriously—I know not if dangerously—ill; and he himself much out of sorts, having never yet (he says, and I believe) recovered from his Father’s death. Blanche, for the present, is quartered at Friends’ and Kinsfolk’s houses.