I will do all I can,--and, if one
cannot succeed, there is a beauty in martyrdom.
Your letters are excellent. I did not mean to check your
writing, only I thought that you might wish a confidence
that I must anticipate with a protest. But I take my natural
position always: and the more I see, the more I feel that it
is regal. Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen.
It is certain that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the
innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather
mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her good
sense. She could say, as if she were stating a scientific fact, in
enumerating the merits of somebody, 'He appreciates _me_.' There
was something of hereditary organization in this, and something of
unfavorable circumstance in the fact, that she had in early life no
companion, and few afterwards, in her finer studies; but there was
also an ebullient sense of power, which she felt to be in her, which
as yet had found no right channels. I remember she once said to me,
what I heard as a mere statement of fact, and nowise as unbecoming,
that 'no man gave such invitation to her mind as to tempt her to a
full expression; that she felt a power to enrich her thought with such
wealth and variety of embellishment as would, no doubt, be tedious to
such as she conversed with.
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