How is your Grantham? My Lansdowne is playing at de petits jeux innocents. I am of a guilty inclination and cannot taste those social innocences, besides, Emmy, we don’t do such things well in England, it don’t suit well, and to fail in a triviality is failure indeed, but the Wilt loves a caper. All this is very well, but I want to talk to you, Emmy. I have such quantities I cannot even tap in a letter, that I could talk out just in one ½ hour.
Louisa Napier[177] is with Lady Londonderry,[178] and the account I think very horrid. Every thing at Cray goes on the same, conversation, laughing, novels, light books, the attaches and habitués coming in, the very red boxes of office left in their places, not a shade of difference in her occupations, amusements or mode of life.
She seems as if determined there shall be no change. This may be fortitude, to me it is frightful. That habits should be so cherished and so rooted as to withstand such a shock as the disappearance of the only object she is ever supposed to have loved by Death, and such a death, is wonderful, and not to be understood if it is upon principles so erroneous....
I dined with the Wellesleys yesterday. Mr. Wellesley[179] acknowledges having been distractedly in love with Sister, and was so pleased to see her at Hastings. He hopes you like the place. His son Arthur is such a cub, and thinks himself so very every thing, it made me quite low. Of the Wellesley girls, the top and bottom dish, or eldest and youngest, are of the specie Geese—the middle ones, Georgina[180] and Mary,[181] are quite delightful, and very uncommon in their way.
Lady Campbell to Miss Eden.
[STRATHFIELD TURGESS,]
April 11, 1824.
Thank you for your last letter, thank you for Lord Lansdowne’s after laugh, but thank you above all, for being still my own Emmy just the same as ever. I suppose you are going to Captain Parry’s[182] fête on board the Hecla, announced in the newspaper. I think he might have asked me, and then I could have got over his ordering all this snow from Gunter’s. However I think he has rather overdone it. I understand there is to be a whole course of Walrus.
I had a letter from Sister, written at Lady Sarah’s[183] the day she left Strathfieldsaye. She is full of good, and agreeable; but yet, I never should be able to be quite friends with her. There is some gall about her which would always give me an afterthought, and keep me perhaps more on my guard with her than with many others who might betray me faster.
I wish you could have seen us all, we were so ill-sorted. As for poor Sister, among three Eton boys, one Oxford merveilleux, 2 silent girls, 1 military clergyman, 2 Colonels, some dancing country neighbours all wound up and going, I don’t know how she survives. By the bye tell me what are a Mr. Adderley and a Miss Adderley[184] to her? Something? Lord Buckinghamshire’s legitimates by a former marriage, or Sister’s illegitimates, or both their children, or no children at all? I was asked and could not tell. Don’t racket yourself to death. I, who no longer sit at good men’s feasts, certainly may magnify the fatigue, but I am sure you do too much.
May, 1824.—There is some saying, Chinese I believe, about not letting grass grow between friends, or words to that effect. Now, you must allow I have mowed it twice, but you will not keep it down, and if you will not, what’s to be done?