14, Nottingham Place, W.,
December 15th, 1879.
Octavia to a Volunteer Worker.
In order to bind the work in the Court (not the collecting, to which this letter does not refer at all) and to make the arrangements simpler and more organised, it is proposed to unite the teachers of the evening classes into a little Committee.
I hope you will be able to join this Committee. I do not think that it will involve you in any labour which will not be very easy, even to so busy a person as you; while it would, in many ways, save you trouble in making arrangements a little more organised and easy to deal with. I think you would all enjoy the little reason for meeting from time to time.
Unless any unforeseen business presents itself, I should think two meetings in the year would be ample; one to settle summer and one winter arrangements, for it is proposed to leave everyone utterly free to do on their evening precisely what seems good to them, so that the only questions that the Committee would have to deal with would be those which might clash with or influence other workers, or in which they would wish to have a voice. My sister, Mrs. Edmund Maurice, will be Secretary of the little Committee. There would be five members, including yourself; but if large questions of general interest were coming before the Committee, it would be well to invite the other workers in the Court to attend and vote, as the landlord is anxious for the room to be as generally useful as possible, especially as Lady Ducie has given up hers to the general use of the Court so entirely by giving the use of it to the Club. I am not without hope that I may have the great pleasure of seeing the Committee meet just once here, after Xmas, before I go. I hope rather great things from it, do you know? I feel how much the life of the Court has developed since I left. All of you seem to me stronger and quite knowing your own strength, which is an immense help. The work is more individual, more living, more firmly rooted; but I don’t like to think that you should lose anything by my absence; and I sometimes dare to hope that this little Committee might, while leaving to each of you full, free scope, give you each the little connecting link you seem as if you might lose in losing me. I mean the power of all meeting for common work, of gathering strength each from the other, of adding power and life each to the other’s work, of knowing and meeting one another, of understanding each what the other means, of pausing for a moment to see if there is anything to learn, to accept, to use in the other’s work, the sense of a common cause and of being one body to interpret that common cause in the noblest way in which it can be conceived, and to sink all little narrow views in the broadest and deepest ones.
GROWTH OF WORK IN OCTAVIA’S ABSENCE
Rome,
February 18th, 1880.
To Miranda.