es of a long line of
statesmen, and having no father or brother or husband to uphold the
family traditions of Democracy, she upholds them herself. She is
intensely interested just now in the party nominations. A split among
the Republicans gives her hope of the election of the Democratic
candidate. She's such a feminine little creature with her soft voice
and appealing manner, with her big white aprons covering her up, and
curling wisps of black hair falling over her little ears, that the
contrasts in her life are almost funny. In our evenings over the
little white boxes, we mix questions of State Rights and Free Trade
with our bridal decorations, and it seems to me that I shall never
again go to a wedding without a vision of my little Cousin Patty among
her orange blossoms, laying down the law on current politics.

The negro question in Cousin Patty's mind is that of the Southerner of
the better class. It isn't these descendants of old families who hate
the negro. Such gentlefolk do not, of course, want equality, but they
want fair treatment for the weaker race. Find me a white man who raves
with rabid prejudice against the black, and I will show you one whose
grandfather belonged not to the planter but to the cracker class, or a
Northerner grafting on Southern Stock. Even in slave times there was
rancor between the black man and what he called "po' white trash" and
it still continues.

The picture of the little bronze boy with his crown of roses lies on my
desk. I should like much to sit with you on the bench beneath the
hundred-leaved bush. What things I should have to say to you! Things
which I dare not write, lest you never let me write again.

You glean the best from everything. That you should take my little
talk about gardens, and fit it to what Ruskin has said, is a gracious
act. You speak of that night in the garden. Do you remember that you
wore a scarlet wrap of thin silk? I could think of nothing as you came
toward me, but of some glorious flower of almost supernatural bloom.
All about you the garden was dying. But you were Life--Life as it
springs up afresh from a world that is dead.

I know how empty the old house seems to you, without Barry, without
Constance, without the beautiful baby whom I have never seen. To me it
can never seem empty with you in it. Is the saying of such things
forbidden? Please believe that I don't mean to force them on you, but
I write as I think.

By thi