listens to me very sweetly when I talk to her about my work. Yesterday she said: “Why, Cousin Harriet, you’re a regular steam engine. It must be jolly good fun to carry a lot of sinners to heaven on an express train.” I told her it was a freight train, and it certainly is, as you know, Patience dear. She replied: “Well, if you get there all the same, a century more or less doesn’t make any difference. You must be right in it with the Lord.” That was the only time I’d heard the dear Lord’s name mentioned since I arrived, so I didn’t scold her. But Patience, dear, I hope you’ll never use slang. I’ve talked to Hal about you, and she says she’s coming to see you. Honora doesn’t use slang. She is very stately and dignified, and Cousin Honora (it’s very awkward when you’re writing for two people to have the same name, isn’t it?) holds her up as a model for the girls. Hal and she _fight_. I can’t call it anything else, although Honora doesn’t lose her temper and Hal does. Hal said to me (of Honora) yesterday (I use her own words, although they’re awful; but if I didn’t I couldn’t give you the same idea of her): “She’s a d—— hypocrite: and she wants to marry Beverly, but she won’t,—not if I have to turn matchmaker and marry him to a variety actress. She makes me wild. I wish she’d elope with the priest, but she’s too confoundedly clever.” Isn’t it dreadful—Honora is a Catholic. She became converted last year. Perhaps that’s the reason I can’t like her. But even the Catholic religion teaches charity, for she said to me this morning: “Poor Hal is really a good-hearted child, but she’s worldly and just a little superficial.” They haven’t any company this week—how kind of Cousin Honora to ask me when they are alone! I wish you were here to enjoy the library. It is a great big room overlooking the river, and the walls are covered with books—three or four generations of them. Mr. Peele is intellectual, and so is Honora; but the others don’t read much, except Hal, who reads dreadful-looking yellow paper books written in the French language which she says are “corkers,” whatever that may mean. I do wish the dear child would read her Bible. I asked her if I gave her a copy if she’d promise me to read a little every day, and she said she would, as some of the stories were as good as a French novel. So I shall buy her one.