I have kept this open, thinking I could tell you definitely when we shall get into our quarters at Schwalbach, but nothing is settled yet, and we've been pottering about in these river towns. As Schlangenbad and Wiesbaden are very full, I counsel my lord to stop here where we are well off; for this is a very comfortable hotel, and I don't want to do any more unpacking till we are finally bestowed in our rooms at the Villa Authës.

There is an abandoned palace of the Grand Duke of Nassau here—one of the ruins in King William's track of '66. It is so melancholy to see these ruined principalities. Union's a very nice word, but forced union, matrimonial or political, is not comfortable either to see or endure. However, here's the palace, with its lovely neglected gardens, grass uncut, wild flowers flaunting where should be trim velvet turf only, fountains plashing in weedy ponds—and an admirable resort we find the shaded avenues and deserted parterres for ourselves and our small queen. We could scarce be better provided for.

To-day, watching from our windows the steamer coming down the river, we spied, on its deck, our travelling companions again—Mr. and Mrs. Malise—and, sure enough, the little gray parcel on the bench not far from mamma! Going at last, I hope, toward that nurse on the Moselle. Poor little Malaise!

Address your next as last year. And with fond love to the whole household,

Your Lil.

18 Stanfield Gardens,
South Kensington,
February 10, 1875 		}

At last I've seen my "poor little Malaise" again. Your questions would have kept him in my memory if there had been a chance of my forgetting the woful baby; and so soon as we were warmly settled into house, home habits, and friendly circle again (and O how charming even London in winter is after seven mortal weeks in Ireland, where scarce anybody has two pence, and everybody is lazy, and everything above the peasant rank is saturated with conventionality and the poorest pride! For the Great Mogul approves of his grandchild, and was pleased to insist on the prolongation of our visit till I was nearly wild with having to behave myself, and during the last week was a dozen times on the very brink of "breaking out." Oh, that horrid life of buckram, inanity, and do-nothing-ism! Even Ronayne, who knows pretty much the worst of me, thought I had gone crazy when we were once fairly off in the train—a carriage all to ourselves. I sang, I whistled, I gnawed chicken-bones, I talked all the slang I could remember, I smoked a cigarette—I went generally to the mischief. And when we had really got back to dear No. 18, and were cosy in the dining-room over our dessert, no speering servant by, I put my elbows on the table; I made a tipsy after-dinner speech, Ronayne applauding, and calling, "Hear! hear!" I rushed around to his end of the table and hugged him, making a "cheese" on my way back—in short, the Bohemian Lil Graham avenged liberally the suffocations the Great Mogul's daughter-in-law had nearly died of. If ever I stop one hour over a fortnight in the home of my husband's fathers again! A fortnight is just supportable)—and to go back to my first-page sentence, I set forth one morning to hunt up the little man. I found my people easily enough—a good house in a good street—"A large house, that must require much thought and care," I said to Mrs. Malise; whereupon she told me the care did not fall upon her, as the house was, after an imperfect fashion, conducted as a coöperative boarding-house—a germ, she hoped, of a coöperative hotel or family club. Half a dozen or so of their friends occupied the house with them, and they paid an admirable housekeeper to manage for them. It was only a make-shift—not what one liked to mention when speaking of future possibilities of confederated homes—had I read the article in a late number of the "Victoria Magazine" containing a magnificent picture of coöperative living?—but better than dreary lodgings or isolated homes, especially when a woman devoted her life to other than household duties. I replied that I believed every ardent spirit at some time or another was discontented with the beaten way, and dreamed of glorious possibilities of associate life and labor, wherein all selfishness should be suppressed, justice and all the beatitudes reign, and souls develop all their capabilities scarce conscious of even the body's hampering; but that practically the only successful lay experiment in communism I had ever heard of was that early one of the Indians in Paraguay under the care of the Jesuit missionaries—Phalansterians who wore their rosaries around their necks because they had no pockets in which to carry them!

And I thought that people without bonds of kinship or close sympathy would not happily bear being forced into incessant, intimate companionship unless they were either saints or prodigies of imperturbable courtesy.

Well, life was a choice of evils, she answered me, and their experiment had so far succeeded very well. But I might judge for myself a little: would I, with my husband, dine with them on either one of such and such days the next week, to meet this confederate household assembled? This was an advance I had not counted on. My especial interest was in the child, and though I liked well enough for myself accepting an invitation that promised to be something out of the common way in dinners, I was hardly prepared to pledge Ronayne. He not only likes a good dinner, and feels injured when he doesn't get it, but he is very particular as to the society in which he eats it. He can be gloriously jolly and informal when he likes; but he wouldn't be his father's son if he weren't what I call just a bit snobbish about the people he will know in England—London especially.