“First. Being situated as I am, and as doubtless many others are more or less, I cannot join it. In my actions I am subject first to my husband, and then to my family. Any one who is entirely free cannot judge how impossible it is to make inelastic and remote rules apply to all the ever-varying and incalculable changes and accidents and personalities of life. They are a disturbing element to us visionaries, which I have been forced to acknowledge and submit to, but which you have not. Having so many to consider and consult, it is all I can do to get through the day’s work; I am obliged to take things as I find them, and do the best I can, in haste; and I might constantly be breaking rules, and not able to help it, and indeed I should not have time to think about it. I do not want to be hampered more than I am. I am not straitened for money; but most people with families are so more or less, and this is another element of difficulty. “Secondly. Although I do not want to be further bound by rules, I believe that as regards principles I am a member of St. George’s Company already; and I do not like to make any further profession which would seem to imply a renunciation of the former errors of my way, and the beginning of a new life. I have never been conscious of any other motives or course of life than those which you advocate; and my children and all around me do not know me in any other light; and I find a gradual and unconscious conformation to them growing up round me, though I have no sort of teaching faculty. I cannot tell how much of them I owe to you, for some of your writings which fell in my way when I was very young made a deep impression on me, and I grew up embued with their spirit; but certainly I cannot now profess it for the first time.