"And then everything would go on delightfully. The very troublesome and obstinate people (on both sides, I think) might, perhaps, all go to America, some to the north and some to the south. For the American plantations are very wide, they say, and by the time they met--say in one or two hundred years--their great-great grandchildren might have given up caring so much about the colours of the vestments and the titles of the clergymen who do the services in the church. So that by that time everything would go on delightfully in America as well as in England. And by next Christmas, from what the gentlemen and ladies about here say, I should think this might all have begun. Only just now this little unpleasant contest has to be gone through first. And I am very much afraid as to what Mr. Drayton and Roger may do, or even Olive. They are so terribly conscientious. They will pick up the smallest questions with their consciences instead of with their common sense; which seems to me like watering a daisy with a fire-engine, or weeding a flower-bed with a plough. Mistress Dorothy is the worst of them (dear, kind, old soul, I must now and then look at her sermons, in order to make it quite clear to myself I was not a hypocrite in listening to them all that time). But I do not think any of them are quite safe in this way. And yet I know, in my inmost heart, they are better than any one in the world, except my Mother, and perhaps Harry. (Of His Majesty it is not for me to speak.) And I love them better than any one in the world, which, I am afraid, they will not believe, now I am not allowed to write to them. I love them for their noble perverseness, and their heroic conscientiousness, and their terrible truthfulness, and everything that separates us. And these last months at home have been the happiest of my life. I felt growing quite good. And one thing I have resolved. I will not say one word I should mind their hearing, so that when we meet again I may have nothing to explain or to unsay. For it is only misunderstanding that will ever make any of them take the wrong side; nothing but misunderstanding. And facts will set that all right when they see how things really are. As they will, I trust, before Christmas.