Accordingly his letters to her continued to concern themselves with intellectual and other external things. He wrote her half a ream of comment upon Darwin’s book, taking up for discussion every marginal note she had made concerning it. But that part of his letter was as coldly intellectual as any of their horseback conversations had been. In all the intimate parts of that and his other letters, he wrote only as one might to a sympathetic friend, as he might have written to Edmonia, for example. He even took half unconscious pains to emphasize the fatherly character of his relations with her, lest they assume some other aspect to her apprehension. On her side Dorothy began now to write outside of herself, as it were. She described to him all her new gowns and bonnets, laughing at the confusion of mind in which a study of such details must involve him. In her childlike loyalty she told him of the wooings that so distressed her, but she did so quite as she might have written to him of the loves of Juliet and Ophelia and the Lady of Lyons. For the rest she wrote objectively now, in the main, and speculatively concerning certain of those social problems in which she knew him to be profoundly interested, and which she was somewhat studying now, because of the interest they had for him. The word “slumming” had not been invented at that time by the insolence that does the thing it means. But Dorothy, chiefly under the guidance of her friends among the newspaper men, went to see how the abjectly poor of a great city lived, and she wrote long letters of comment to Arthur in which she told him how great and distressing the revelation was, and how she honored his desire to do something for the amelioration of these people’s lives. “Your aspiration is indeed a noble one,” she wrote in one of her letters; “the life you proposed to yourself, and from which you were diverted by your inheritance of a plantation, is the very greatest, the very noblest that any man could lead. I once thought you were doing even better in the care you are taking of the negroes at Wyanoke and Pocahontas, and in your efforts ultimately to set them free. But that was when I did not know. I know now, in part at least, and I understand your feeling in the matter as I never could have done had I not seen for myself.