Mrs. Malise. That reminds me of that household. Our latest news from it, through Mr. Feldwick, who belongs to a "Sordello" club, for which my liege had a hankering, only they made him an Irish member, and so he'd no time (you wonder what a Sordello club may be? A society of ladies and gentlemen, dear, who read Sordello with a key, and try to find out whatever it's all about!), and Mr. Feldwick is good enough to keep him au courant of their discoveries and interpretations, and gossips with me about the Domestic Club. About this Mr. Feldwick is concerned. In losing Mrs. Stainton and Miss Hedges, the house lost much in his eyes, and there have been other changes, and all so much for the worse, that Mr. F. is seriously debating whether the place can long continue sufficiently respectable to be honored by the presence of himself and Smut—his pug dog. The people whom Lady —— brings about the place get queerer and queerer, and the ideas and schemes they broach are——"I'm a man of the world, and something of a philosopher myself," says Mr. F., "and I know human nature has plenty of shady corners; but, aw, really, aw, you know there must be some limit!"—which I was glad to hear from the Truth-Seeker. Young ——'s gone off to see if the Fiji islanders or some other outlandish creatures haven't more morality and tenderness and general virtues than the men and women of civilization; and when I tell you he sailed just after the death by diphtheria of three of poor Mimi's children, leaving her to bear that, as all things, unhelped by him, you'll wish with me, that some coppery, tough old savage'll eat him for his investigating pains! If anything can cure her infatuation, one would think this last stroke of barbarity might, and perhaps then there would be some hope for the singer lover, who has taken care of her, shared her grief—borne all the burden that the miserable new Rousseau refused.
The food-reforming trio are gone from the associate household. "The Food-Regenerator" has not the circulation it deserves. Its editor threw up a secretaryship that was profitable, but cramping to a soaring, unmercenary spirit. So the emoluments of the journal were insufficient for the club life, and they've retired to a poor lodging where that weary white cat, I suppose, is trying to keep the heroic little man and all her hungry progeny—ravens, I of course meant to say, only I'd called their mother a cat!—on broad beans and porridge and next to nothing a week, and do the work of an office-boy besides!
The third member of the trio, the young girl who told me she was to be a "healer," has had a sad fate. She had, it seems, some liabilities to lung disease which she determined to starve out; so the great rations of bran bread and prunes, which distressed Ronayne at the dinner-party, dwindled, months ago, to two or three ounces of bread daily, and a little fruit—the quantity becoming so small that her mother piteously declared they could not understand how she lived at all.
Reducing her food day by day, she went, in June, to Aberystwith for some weeks. While there, she fell asleep while reading one afternoon in a cave on the coast, and when she wakened it was night, the rain falling heavily, the tide risen so that all egress from the cave was cut off, and she a prisoner. At that season of the year there was no danger beyond that of fright and exposure to damp and chill so many hours; for the water only rises high in the cave during great storms; but even if she had been told this, who remembers or reasons clearly in such sudden, awful moments? But she came out so soon as morning and the ebbing water released her, walked the two or three miles back to her lodging, told her story with apparent calmness, and before night was a raving maniac, so wild and uncontrollable that her family were obliged to place her in a lunatic asylum, and as yet there is nothing favorable to report in her case.
Mrs. Stainton still at Bournemouth, but writing often either to Miss Hedges or to me. In one of her last notes she says, "Do you remember that little story I told you of Ste. Colette, the Saint who was walled up? I think of her so often, so anxiously; I think, I almost think, it will come to that—walling up, I'm afraid not the sanctity?—with me. What a harbor it looks—the cloistered life! And there never seemed to be any place for me in the world. Everything has turned to ashes in my grasp and on my lips. Perhaps it was that the religious life was always calling me. I repeat Père La Cordaire's saying over and over to myself, 'When we Frenchmen become religious, we do it meaning to be religious up to the neck.'
"I should not enter an active order. I have not the strength. But the contemplative ones draw me, draw me. Pray for me!"
Mrs. Stainton, Sybarite of Sybarites, a Carmelite, a poor Clare sleeping on a plank, washing herself with cold water and sand, living on begged bits, bad herrings, and limp cabbages! Shall we indeed see that?
20th July.
Susie! Susie! what an ending I must give my letter. Little Malaise is dead!
"Have you read the papers to-day, Lil?" Ronayne asked me as he was dressing for dinner two days ago.