Oh, dear, how one does write on! But I think it pleases Mother, and I’m sure it helps me....
I fancy my darling will be pleased to get a kiss from her little one to welcome her in London, as she cannot see her knight at Shoreditch!— _dear_ old lady,—would she could! But, Mother, you would let Daddy go with you if you really _wished_ for anyone? I tell you, as I have told you a hundred times before, how gladly your child will stay at home altogether if ever Mother really wishes for and wants her there, or will come from anywhere at any moment as rapidly as trains can bring her, if only Mother wishes for her for any purpose or none.”
She did not always find this quite so easy. On October 17th she writes in her diary: “Being all but late this morning, it is decreed that for one week from this time S. J-B. rises every morning while the stroke of the half hour and minute hand are ‘one and the same straight line.’
It is scarcely necessary to say that Resolution responded to the appeal.
It is very unlikely that she gave those about her the impression of being _dévote_: that never was her way. The “spikes” Miss Octavia Hill referred to were probably in full evidence. In her diary she writes,—
“A talk with Miss E. and Miss H. about the sacraments, and ‘preparation’. Miss Gruben instanced with horror,—‘In England a party the night before.’ I said, ‘The theatre, with all my heart.’ Exclamations. ‘If I could not take the Communion half an hour after leaving the theatre, I would never enter it.’ Then found myself in the disagreeable position of apparent Pharasaism. ‘Wish I were so good, etc!’ or hints like that. Yet surely, Octa? If there is a time when we cannot kneel for the Communion, that time should be blotted out. ‘Living to God’,—how that blends and binds all life!
Today dear Mrs. Teed. God bless her! Yes, surely,—now she would not be hard on ‘prayer for the dead’. Yet what a noble soul! Ah, if she had lived,—if I could have justified myself to her whom I so respected. But, as Dora says, she knows it all now! Perhaps her spirit sees and sympathises with mine that looks with such love to her footsteps gone before. In life she would have disapproved of some things,—now at least she will see motives. ‘I believe in the communion of saints.’...