Airth
stands to you for an abstract thing--uncompromising manhood, in its
strength and assurance; very attractive after the loneliness and sense of
being cut adrift, which have been your portion lately. Only,
remember--where living men and women are concerned, the safely abstract
is apt suddenly to become the perilously personal; and your future
happiness may be seriously involved, before you realise the danger. I
confess, I fail to understand the man's avoidance of you. He sounds the
sort of fellow who would be friendly and pleasant toward all women, and
passionately loyal to one. Perhaps you, with your sweet loveliness--a
fact, my dear, notwithstanding the observations in the Park, of Miss
Amelia's crony!--may remind him of some long-closed page of past history,
and he may shrink from the pain of a consequent turning of memory's
leaves. No doubt Miss Susannah recalls some nice old maiden-aunt, and he
can afford to respond to her blandishments.

What you say of the way in which Americans know our standard authors,
reminds me of a fellow-passenger on board the _Baltic_, on our outward
voyage--a charming woman, from Hartford, Connecticut, who sat beside us
at meals. She had been spending five months in Europe, travelling
incessantly, and finished up with London--her first visit to our
capital--expecting to be altogether too tired to enjoy it; but found it a
place of such abounding interest and delight, that life went on with
fresh zest, and fatigue was forgotten. "Every street," she explained, "is
so familiar. We have never seen them before, and yet they are more
familiar than the streets of our native cities. It is the London of
Dickens and of Thackeray. We know it all. We recognise the streets as we
come to them. The places are homelike to us. _We have known them all our
lives._" I enjoyed this tribute to our English literature. But I wonder,
my dear Myra, how many streets, east of Temple Bar, in our dear old
London, are "homelike" to you!

Garth insists upon sending you at once a selection of his favourites from
among the works of Dickens. So expect a bulky package before long. You
might read them aloud to the Miss Murgatroyds, while they knit and wind
wool.

Garth thoroughly enjoyed our trip to America. You know why we went? Since
he lost his sight, all sounds mean so much to him. He is so boyishly
eager to hear all there is to be heard in the world. Any possibility of a
new sound-experience fills him with enthusi