The letter may have been written in a moment of irritation about something else, or indeed about this very subject of dress, for young folks are sensitive as to the appearance of their valued friends; but it certainly contained more than a germ of truth. Fortunately youth and a radiant personality cover a multitude of shortcomings in this respect, and contemporary correspondence often points to the extent to which the Almighty had “favoured” S. J.-B. “in person as well as in mind.” In this connection there is an interesting letter of this period from an old schoolfellow, the daughter of a former schoolmistress. After a graphic account of a lecture by Thackeray, at which the writer had the good fortune to be present, she says: “In face Thackeray is the image of—whom, do you think? Guess. Someone you know,—of _yourself_. Yes, indeed, of you, Sophy Blake. Mama and I were both struck, almost startled, by the resemblance.” It happened by a curious coincidence some years later that Laurence was taking S. J.-B.’s portrait not very long after he had taken Thackeray’s, and he expressed himself as greatly struck by the similarity of the lines in the two faces. S. J.-B.’s magnificent, speaking brown eyes, however, were hers alone. “If they were taken out and laid on a plate,” said a forcible young friend, “they would still be beautiful!” As regards love and marriage, one can only say that, for a girl in the middle of the last century she thought of them surprisingly little. She speaks occasionally of her own marriage as if it were as much a matter of course as her coming of age, and, after enjoying some pleasant boy- and-girl intercourse with an unknown “H.” at the house of her cousins, she describes him as “the sort of man I may probably marry in the end.” Visiting a newly-married girl cousin, she frankly admits the charm of the comradeship, for indeed, as a friend said of her (with more truth than elegance of diction) a few years later than the point we have reached: “You have taken on you a hard, hard vocation from your youngest days,—and yet it is scarcely so hard for anyone in the world to stand alone.” In any case S. J.-B. went straight on her course, like many of the finest girls of our own day, without giving any thought to cross currents that might alter the course of her life. And indeed her daily life was absorbing enough. It is scarcely surprising if, among her many interests, her religious life was somewhat smothered for the time, or that, at least she thought so. “Mrs. Thornton called my doing what I had done ‘noble’. Yes, if for _His_ sake, but, alas, much more—altogether—for my own. Yet my loving the work is no disqualification for doing it for Him. I trust I do do good a little. Surely honest intellectual help is something, if of lower class.... I have thought—I cannot take more work, Sunday School, etc., but what I do is _good_ in its degree; if done in His name, surely He will accept it.”