I make conscience of good health, early hours, thick shoes, and mental and bodily drill, and subjection. Please God, I mean to do something worthy a Christian woman before I die, and to open a path through which weaker women shall walk out of this morass of fashion-slavery, and subjection, where they flounder now. I take for my motto that sentence from one of Dr. Johnson's allegories you once read to us: "No life pleasing to God that is not useful to man." I hope, my dear friend, I shall keep the spirit of Christ, though I wander from the letter. Such words as you have spoken to me, however, can never come amiss. Perhaps when I am old and wiser, like many another self-confident wanderer, I may be glad to come back to my mother's house, and then, perhaps, I shall be a stiff little church-woman. At all events I shall always be your loving and grateful pupil.
Ida.
[Eva Van Arsdel to Isabel Convers.]
My Dear Belle: Thanks for your kind letter with all its congratulations and inquiries,—for though as yet I have no occasion for congratulation, and nothing to answer to inquiry, I appreciate these all the same.
No—Belle, the "old sixpence" is not gone yet,—you will have to keep to your friend a while longer. I am not engaged, and you have full liberty to contradict that report everywhere and anywhere.
Mr. Sydney is, of course, very polite, and very devoted, very much a friend of the family and all that, but I am not engaged to him, and you need never believe any such thing of me till you hear it directly, under my own hand and seal.
There have been a lot of engagements in our set lately. Lottie Trevillian is going to marry Sim Carrington, and Bessie Somers has at last decided to take old Watkins—though he is twenty-five years older than she,—and then there's Cousin Maria Elmore has just turned a splendid affair with young Livingstone, really the most brilliant match of the winter. I am positively ashamed of myself, under these circumstances, to be sitting still, and unable to report progress. My old infelicity in making up my mind seems to haunt me, and I dare say I shall live to be a dreadful example.
By the by, I have had a curious sort of an adventure lately. You know when I was up at Englewood visiting you last summer, I was just raving over those sonnets on Italy, which appeared in the "Milky Way" over the signature of "X." You remember those verses on "Fra Angelico" and the "Campanile," don't you? Well, I have found out who this X is. It's a Mr. Henderson that is now in New York, engaged on the staff of "The Great Democracy." We girls have noticed him once or twice walking with Jim Fellows—(you remember Jim;) Jim says he is a perfect hermit, devoted to study and writing, and never goes into society. Well, wasn't it odd that the fates should have thrown this hermit just in my way?