say hateful things as if you were trying and failing. How angry that makes me! One is almost tempted sometimes to accept just to show that one can; but, seriously, dear Belle, this is wicked trifling. Marriage is an awful, a tremendous thing, and we of the church are without excuse if we go into it lightly or unadvisedly, and I never shall marry till I see the man that is my fate. I have what mamma calls domestic ideas, and _I'm going to have them_, and when I marry it shall be for the man alone, not a pieced up affair of carriages, horses, diamonds, opera boxes, cashmeres _with_ a man, but a _man_ for whom all the world were well lost; then I shall not be afraid of the church service which now stands between me and Mr. Sydney. I cannot, I dare not lie to God and swear falsely at the altar, to gain the whole world. I wish you could hear our new rector. He is making a sensation among us. If the life he is calling on us all to live is the real and true one, we shall soon have to choose between what is called society, and the church; for if being a church-woman means all he says, one cannot be in it without really making religion the life's business--which, you know, we none of us do or have. Dear man, when I see him tugging and straining to get our old, sleepy, rich families into heavenly ways, I think of Pegasus yoked to a stone cart. He is all life and energy and enthusiasm, he breathes fire, and his wings are spread heavenward, but there's the old dead, lumbering cart at his heels! Poor man!--and poor cart too--for I am in it with the rest of the lumber! We are in all the usual Spring agonies now about clothes. The house reverberates with the discussion of hats and bonnets, and feathers and flowers, and overskirts and underskirts, and all the paraphernalia--and what an absurd combination it makes with the daily services in Lent. Absurd? No--_dreadful!_ for at church we are reading of our Saviour's poverty and fasting and agonies--what a contrast between his life and ours! Was it to make us such as we are that he thus lived and died? Cousin Sophia is happy in her duties in the sisterhood. Her church life and daily life are all of a piece--one part is not a mockery of the other. There's Ida too--out of the church, making no profession of churchly religion, but living wholly out of this bustling, worldly sphere, devoted to a noble life purpose--fitting herself to make new and better paths for women. Ida has none of these dress troubles; she has cut loose from all. Her simple black dress costs incredibly less than our outfit--it is all arranged _with a purpose_--yet she always has the air of a lady, and she has besides a real _repose_, which we never do. This matter of dress has a thousand jars and worries and vexations to a fastidious nature; one wishes one were out of it.