Your mode of living is without pretension, and without expenditure for mere appearances; and I feel certain that appearances, and not the positive and necessary comforts of life, such as sufficient firing and food, are the heaviest expenses of gentlefolks.... If the life is more than meat or raiment, which I quite agree to, meat and raiment are more than platters and trimmings; and it is the style that half the time necessitates the starvation....
MY LOOK-OUT. Now I am at Yarmouth; though t'other side the page I was at Norwich. The earth is white, the sea is black, the sky gray, and everything most melancholy. I act here to-night, and to-morrow and on Sunday go on to Lynn, where I act Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; and Thursday at Cambridge. On Friday I go back to town, and on Saturday to Mrs. Grote's. I am in just such a little room as those we used to pass in walking along the Parade at St. Leonard's—a small ground-floor room, about sixteen feet square, the side facing the sea, one large bow-window in three compartments; just such a gravel terrace before it as the one we walked up and down together; and the very same sea, dark, neutral-tinted, with its frothing edge of white, as if it was foaming at the mouth in a black convulsion, that your eyes look upon from your window. It is in some respects exactly like St. Leonard's, and again as much the reverse as sad loneliness is to loving and delightful companionship.
I have a sort of lost-child feeling whenever I go to a strange place, that very few people who know me would give me credit for; but that's because they don't know me.
God bless you, dear. Kiss dear Dorothy for me.
I am ever yours,
Fanny.
Yarmouth, 22d.
My very dear and most sententious friend, I never do run the time of my departure for railroad trains "to the chances of free streets and fast-driving cabmen;" I always allow amply for all accidents, as I have a greater horror of being hurried and jostled even than of being too late. But my driver, the day I left town, was, I think, inexperienced as well as sulky. He was very young, and though I was too ignorant of city localities to direct him positively, my recollection of the route which I had traversed before seemed to me to indicate that he did not take the most direct way.
You ask me what I think of E——'s note, and if it seems "wonderfully aristocratic" to me. Aristocratic after the English fashion, which, thank God, is far from being a very genuine fashion—their "airs" being for the most part adulterated by the good, sound, practical common sense of the race, as their blood is polluted with the wholesome, vigorous, handsome, intelligent vital fluid of the classes below them. No real aristocrat would have mentioned Miss ——'s maiden name as if she was a woman of family—(née—geborne; that was a delightful German woman who said she wasn't geborne at all)—for Miss ——, being only a banker's daughter, was, of course "nobody."
The real aristocratic principle is not—I say again, thank God!—often to be found among us islanders of Britain. In Austria, where the Countess Z—— and the Princess E—— are looked upon as the earth under the feet of the Vienna nobility, the one being Lord S——'s daughter and the other Lord J——'s, they have a better notion of the principle of the question. There were only four families in all the British peerage who could have furnished their daughter with the [requisite] number of quarterings for one of those Austrian alliances.