“N.B.--I find that I’ve called her my little Susy! Pretty well, as I’ve been only a week in the place. Am I going down into another pit, I wonder--a deeper abyss than that into which Rosa casts her victims? Poor, pretty, fawn-eyed little darling! Take care of yourself, my dear Robert. Poor, friendless Susy! She couldn’t well be _worse off_ under any circumstances than she is in this place, that’s one blessing: the drudge of a mistress who is herself a slave in the bondage of poverty. I went down to the kitchen yesterday to get a fresh supply of coals--these people are ready to fall down and worship me because I’m not proud, as they put it; but there are numerous orders of pride, I think,--and I saw their dinner. Such a poor bone of mutton! Poor little Susy! how she would open her eyes at sight of the Richmond and Greenwich banquets that I have seen given to persons as inferior to herself as--Hyperion to the other person. What a frightful hindrance to original composition is that abominable habit of hackneyed quotation!--the great newspaper-mill going round three-hundred-and-thirteen times a year, and only one little limited stock of quotations for all the leader-writers. “_November 16._--Sunday, and a wet day: saw Susan start for church in the morning with prayer-books and children. Strolled out with umbrella a little after twelve; found church; unpleasant new building, smelling of damp stucco, and looking like an edifice of soddened brown paper; waited in the porch, patient as that young idiot in Arthur Pendennis’s poem, until my lady came out, and conducted her home in triumph under my umbrella, while the awkward squad of children brought up the rear under cover of the maternal gingham. She was obliged to take my arm; and as the walk from the church is rather a long one, we got alarmingly intimate--when I say alarmingly intimate, I mean that she has taken to blushing when I speak to her. That’s the worst of these fawn-like girls; they will blush! And when they’re pretty, the blushes are so bewitching. And when they don’t happen to have fifty thousand or so, what is a fellow to do? Take to his heels, replies the stern moralist, who has sown his own wild oats twenty years ago, and is envious of the young scatterers of to-day. I came to Coltonslough to read; and come what may, I shall stay there till it’s time to go back to St. B. In the meantime, Susan is a brown-eyed angel--an angel who leads the life of a low-bred drudge, and for whom any possible change of circumstances _must_ be a change for the better.