Myra Ingleby.
Letter from the Honourable Mrs. Dalmain to Lady Ingleby.
Castle Gleneesh, N. B.
My Dear Myra,
No, I have not the smallest objection to representing rice pudding, or anything else plain and wholesome, providing I agree with you, and suffice for the need of the moment.
I am indeed glad to have so good a report. It proves Deryck right in his diagnosis and prescription. Keep to the latter faithfully, in every detail.
I am much interested in your account of your fellow-guests at the Moorhead Inn. No, I do not misunderstand your letter; nor do I credit you with any foolish sentimentality, or Susie-like flutterings. Jim Airth stands to you for an abstract thing—uncompromising manhood, in its strength and assurance; very attractive after the loneliness and sense of being cut adrift, which have been your portion lately. Only, remember—where living men and women are concerned, the safely abstract is apt suddenly to become the perilously personal; and your future happiness may be seriously involved, before you realise the danger. I confess, I fail to understand the man’s avoidance of you. He sounds the sort of fellow who would be friendly and pleasant toward all women, and passionately loyal to one. Perhaps you, with your sweet loveliness—a fact, my dear, notwithstanding the observations in the Park, of Miss Amelia’s crony!—may remind him of some long-closed page of past history, and he may shrink from the pain of a consequent turning of memory’s leaves. No doubt Miss Susannah recalls some nice old maiden-aunt, and he can afford to respond to her blandishments.
What you say of the way in which Americans know our standard authors, reminds me of a fellow-passenger on board the Baltic, on our outward voyage—a charming woman, from Hartford, Connecticut, who sat beside us at meals. She had been spending five months in Europe, travelling incessantly, and finished up with London—her first visit to our capital—expecting to be altogether too tired to enjoy it; but found it a place of such abounding interest and delight, that life went on with fresh zest, and fatigue was forgotten. “Every street,” she explained, “is so familiar. We have never seen them before, and yet they are more familiar than the streets of our native cities. It is the London of Dickens and of Thackeray. We know it all. We recognise the streets as we come to them. The places are homelike to us. We have known them all our lives.” I enjoyed this tribute to our English literature. But I wonder, my dear Myra, how many streets, east of Temple Bar, in our dear old London, are “homelike” to you!
Garth insists upon sending you at once a selection of his favourites from among the works of Dickens. So expect a bulky package before long. You might read them aloud to the Miss Murgatroyds, while they knit and wind wool.