SOUTH KENSINGTON, }
February 10, 1875 }

At last I've seen my "poor little Malaise" again. Your questions would
have kept him in my memory if there had been a chance of my forgetting
the woful baby; and so soon as we were warmly settled into house, home
habits, and friendly circle again (and O how charming even London in
winter is after seven mortal weeks in Ireland, where scarce anybody has
two pence, and everybody is lazy, and everything above the peasant rank
is saturated with conventionality and the poorest pride! For the Great
Mogul approves of his grandchild, and was pleased to insist on the
prolongation of our visit till I was nearly wild with having to behave
myself, and during the last week was a dozen times on the very brink of
"breaking out." Oh, that horrid life of buckram, inanity, and
do-nothing-ism! Even Ronayne, who knows pretty much the worst of me,
thought I had gone crazy when we were once fairly off in the train--a
carriage all to ourselves. I sang, I whistled, I gnawed chicken-bones, I
talked all the slang I could remember, I smoked a cigarette--I went
generally to the mischief. And when we had really got back to dear No.
18, and were cosy in the dining-room over our dessert, no speering
servant by, I put my elbows on the table; I made a tipsy after-dinner
speech, Ronayne applauding, and calling, "Hear! hear!" I rushed around
to his end of the table and hugged him, making a "cheese" on my way
back--in short, the Bohemian Lil Graham avenged liberally the
suffocations the Great Mogul's daughter-in-law had nearly died of. If
ever I stop one hour over a fortnight in the home of my husband's
fathers again! A fortnight is just supportable)--and to go back to my
first-page sentence, I set forth one morning to hunt up the little man.
I found my people easily enough--a good house in a good street--"A large
house, that must require much thought and care," I said to Mrs. Malise;
whereupon she told me the care did not fall upon her, as the house was,
after an imperfect fashion, conducted as a cooeperative boarding-house--a
germ, she hoped, of a cooeperative hotel or family club. Half a dozen or
so of their friends occupied the house with them, and they paid an
admirable housekeeper to manage for them. It was only a make-shift--not
what one liked to mention when speaking of future possibilities of
confederated homes--had I read the article in a late number of the
"Victoria Magazine" containing a