I wonder what he is? He might be an artist, but he doesn’t seem quite like an artist; or just a dilettante, but he doesn’t look in the least like a dilettante. Or he might be an architect; I think that is the [p36] most probable guess of all. Perhaps he is only ‘going to be’ one of these things, for he can’t be more than twenty-five or twenty-six. Still, he looks as if he were something already; that is, he has a kind of self-reliance in his mien—not self-assertion, nor self-esteem, but belief in self, as if he were able, and knew that he was able, to conquer circumstances.
Aunt Celia wouldn’t stay at Ye Olde Bell and Horns here. She looked under the bed (which, I insist, was an unfair test), and ordered her luggage to be taken instantly to the Grand Pump Room Hotel.
Memoranda: Bath became distinguished for its architecture and popular as a fashionable resort in the 17th century from the deserved repute of its waters and through the genius of two men, Wood the architect and Beau Nash, Master of Ceremonies. A true picture of the society of the period is found in Smollett’s ‘Humphry Clinker’, [p37] which Aunt Celia says she will read and tell me what is necessary. Remember the window of the seven lights in the Abbey Church, the one with the angels ascending and descending; also the rich Perp. chantry of Prior Bird, S. of chancel. It is Murray who calls it a Perp. chantry, not I.
She
June 8.
It was very wet this morning, and I had breakfast in my room. The maid’s name is Hetty Precious, and I could eat almost anything brought me by such a beautifully named person. A little parcel postmarked Bath was on my tray, but as the address was printed, I have no clue to the sender. It was a wee copy of Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion,’ which I have read before, but was glad to see again, because I had forgotten that the scene is partly laid in Bath, [p38] and now I can follow dear Anne and vain Sir Walter, hateful Elizabeth and scheming Mrs. Clay through Camden Place and Bath Street, Union Street, Milsom Street, and the Pump Yard. I can even follow them to the site of the White Hart Hotel, where the adorable Captain Wentworth wrote the letter to Anne. After more than two hundred pages of suspense, with what joy and relief did I read that letter! I wonder if Anne herself was any more excited than I?
At first I thought Roderick Abbott sent the book, until I remembered that his literary taste is Puck in America and Pick-me-up and Tit-Bits in England; and now I don’t know what to think. I turned to Captain Wentworth’s letter in the last chapter but one—oh, it is a beautiful letter! I wish somebody would ever write me that he is ‘half agony, half hope,’ and that I ‘pierce his soul.’ Of course, it [p39] would be wicked to pierce a soul, and of course they wouldn’t write that way nowadays; but there is something perfectly delightful about the expression.
Well, when I found the place, what do you suppose? Some of the sentences in the letter seem to be underlined ever so faintly; so faintly, indeed, that I cannot quite decide whether it’s my imagination or a lead-pencil, but this is the way it seems to look: