She wrote to him about a week after his last visit to St. James's Square.
"Why do you not come to take a dish of tea with me? My friends are leaving for their country seats, and I have been alone several afternoons, expecting you. Were you affronted with me for calling you a spinster aunt? Sure our friendship, and my esteem for your goodness, should excuse that careless impertinence. I enclose a bank bill which I pray you to spend as quickly as possible in buying clothing and shoes for the little ragged wretches I met coming out of your school yesterday. Ah, when will there be such schools all over England, in every city, in every village? Sure some day the country will take a lesson from such men as you and Mr. Wesley, and the poor will be better cared for than they are now."
The easy assurance of her letter surprised him. Every line indicated the woman of the world, the finished coquette. He replied coldly, thanking her for her bounty, and giving his absorbing occupations as a reason for not waiting upon her.
They met a week later in Sally Dormer's garret; but Antonia was leaving as he entered, and he did nothing to detain her. He had a brief vision of her beauty, more simply dressed than usual, in a black silk mantle and hood over a grey tabinet gown. He came upon her some days after in a shed at the back of the Vauxhall Pottery, entertaining a large party of pottery girls at supper, herself the merriest of the band. She had her woman Sophy to help her, and Mrs. Patty Granger, and he had never seen a more jovial feast. There was a long table upon trestles, loaded with joints and poultry, pies and puddings, and great copper tankards of small beer; at which feast two reluctant footmen, with disgusted countenances, assisted in undress livery, while an old blind fiddler sat in a corner playing the gayest tunes in his répertoire.
Antonia begged Mr. Stobart to stay and keep them company, but he declined. It was his class night, he told her, and he had his adult scholars waiting for him hard by. He carried away the vision of her radiant countenance, supremely happy in the happiness she had made for others. Was it possible better to realize the lessons of the Divine Altruist? And yet she was no more a Christian than the profligate Bolingbroke or the cynic Voltaire.
He was consistent and conscientious in his determination to avoid her, so far as possible without incivility. The town was beginning to thin, and he heard with relief that she was going on a visit to the Duchess of Portland at Bulstrode, near Maidenhead. In the autumn she was to be at Tunbridge Wells, to drink the waters, a business of six weeks.
"My physician orders it, though I swear I have nothing the matter with me," she told him, at one of their chance meetings in the Marsh. "'Tis good for my nerves to waste six weeks in a place where there is a dance every night, and where I shall spend every day in a crowd."
In another of these casual meetings she upbraided him for having deserted her.
"I have been more than usually busy," he said. "My schools are growing, and the dispensary is daily becoming a more serious business."
"Everything with you is serious; but you cannot be so seriously busy as not to have leisure for a dish of tea in St. James's Square once in a fortnight. Sure you know my heart is with you in all your good works, and that I like to hear about them."