threescore years and ten there would probably always be somebody to bake them for us and were happy, nevertheless. Then Tryphena came and stayed an hour, and now I am not so happy as I was. I would not dwell upon her, I would pass to other themes, but one has a feeling that Tryphena has been too much omitted from accounts of our little town. Such chronicles have been somehow too playful; one would think we did nothing but discover affinities and listen to the band and eat expensive things in tins. One would think life was all joy and pleasure whereas there are Associations of every kind. Whatever may have been the case in the golden age, or the time of Lord Lytton, I believe that the great over-fed conscience of Great Britain now sends out more Tryphenas every year, and their good works have to be seriously reckoned with in considering the possibility of remaining here. We have our traditions, of course, but we are practically compelled to live upon them, and it seems to me that a distant world should hear not only of our declining past but of what we have increasingly to put up with. I would not have invited Tryphena to occupy a chapter, but as she has walked in without this formality she might as well stay. Indeed I would not have invited her. She is the kind of Tryphena that never comes to see you unless you are ill. I am not so agreeable when I am ill--I imagine few people are--and I prefer visits, at such a time, only from people who are fond of seeing me when I am well. Why in heaven’s name, when you are feverish or aguish or panting for breath, you should be expected to accept as a “kindness” a visit from a person who never thinks of you until you become a helpless object to whet her righteousness on, who comes and inflicts a personality upon you to which the most robust health only enables you to be barely polite, is to me an irritating conundrum. I had taken particular pains to be reported to Tryphena as entirely convalescent, “quite out of the doctor’s hands;” I did not want to be on her parish books. Why should I suffer to enable her to do her duty? Why should she have things put down to her credit at my expense? This does not seem to me reasonable or proper and I am averse to it. Yet I have told her, such is my hypocrisy, how good it was of her to come, and she has gone away better pleased with herself than ever.