“I am very deep in work, but I manage to find time for you, and to think of you and your approaching ordination. You are about to take the most serious step in your life, and I hope and pray that it may be blessed to you and to those among whom you may have to work during the rest of your life. It is a noble profession, but one that entails much self-control and self-sacrifice. But if you think chiefly of the work to which you are called, and not of yourself, you will be useful and happy. You must not think too much about what people may say or think of you, but simply do your work faithfully and leave the results. You are disposed to mind ‘Mrs. Grundy’ too much, my very dear boy, but this is not a good thing if carried to excess. To be careful in imagination, to put one’s self into the place of another, is right, but this is the opposite of minding ‘Mrs. Grundy.’” These letters are full of wisdom as well as of tender thoughtfulness. She wanted him to profit to the full by the advantages which she esteemed so highly. “At Cambridge, more than anywhere else,” she says (for the moment forgetting Oxford), “is to be found the highest product, so far, of human civilization. Men there get the highest culture ever yet attained, and the ‘Dons’ are also the most finished gentlemen. There is an indescribable something in the bearing, air, tone of voice even, of a Cambridge man which I believe he never loses all his life. But the men are most courteous towards women: that is one distinct mark of their training. I have never heard a rough word nor seen a rough act towards women, and I want you to become such a man as the best men in your University.” At the same time she is interested in the smallest details of the new life, as when she writes— “It was a great delight to me to see you in your rooms. But the sofa is rather shabby. Shall I send you an Afghan rug to throw over it? Tell me. Perhaps you would rather choose one for yourself?” But of all the friends of whom she thought and for whom she cared time would fail to tell. Her sky was full of “bright particular stars,” each moving in its own orbit. Perhaps her regard may have been most fixed by the “double-stars,” of which there were many brilliant examples. Her “dual friendships” seemed to have doubled strength and joy for her. It was either that her friends married to please her as well as each other, or that she could at the same time include divergent characters; but all her life she was singularly happy in her married friends. Her ideal of family life was high, as we see from an interesting letter written from Bonaly in September, 1877—