University of Virginia Library

MY Dear Mother: Harry says I must do all the
writing to you and keep you advised of all our
affairs, because he is so driven with his editing and proof-reading
that letter-writing is often the most fatiguing
thing he can do. It is like trying to run after one has
become quite out of breath.

The fact is, dear mother, the demands of this New
York newspaper life are terribly exhausting. It's a sort
of red-hot atmosphere of hurry and competition. Magazines
and newspapers jostle each other, and run races,
neck and neck, and everybody connected with them is
kept up to the very top of his speed, or he is thrown
out of the course. You see, Bolton and Harry have
between them the oversight of three papers—a monthly
magazine for the grown folk, another for the children,
and a weekly paper. Of course there are sub-editors,
but they have the general responsibility, and so you see
they are on the qui vive all the time to keep up; for
there are other papers and magazines running against
them, and the price of success seems to be eternal
vigilance. What is exacted of an editor now-a-days
seems to be a sort of general omniscience. He must
keep the run of everything,—politics, science, religion,
art, agriculture, general literature; the world is alive
and moving everywhere, and he must know just
what's going on and be able to have an opinion ready
made and ready to go to press at any moment. He

must tell to a T just what they are doing in Ashantee
and Dahomey, and what they don't do and ought to do
in New York. He must be wise and instructive about
currency and taxes and tariffs, and able to guide
Congress; and then he must take care of the Church,
— know just what the Old Catholics are up to,
the last new kink of the Ritualists, and the right and
wrong of all the free fights in the different denominations.
It really makes my little head spin just to hear
what they are getting up articles about. Bolton and
Harry are kept on the chase, looking up men whose
specialties lie in these lines to write for them. They
have now in tow a Jewish Rabbi, who is going to do
something about the Talmud, or Targums, or something
of that sort; and a returned missionary from the Gaboon
River, who entertained Du Chaillu and can speak authentically
about the gorilla; and a lively young doctor
who is devoting his life to the study of the brain and
nervous system. Then there are all sorts of writing men
and women sending pecks and bushels of articles to be
printed, and getting furious if they are not printed, though
the greater part of them are such hopeless trash that you
only need to read four lines to know that they are good
for nothing; but they all expect them to be re-mailed
with explanations and criticisms, and the ladies sometimes
write letters of wrath to Harry that are perfectly
fearful.

Altogether there is a good deal of an imbroglio, and
you see with it all how he comes to be glad that I have a
turn for letter-writing and can keep you informed of how
we of the interior go on. My business in it all is to
keep a quiet, peaceable, restful home, where he shall
always have the enjoyment of seeing beautiful things and
find everything going on nicely without having to think
why, or how, or wherefore; and, besides this, to do every

little odd and end for him that he is too tired or too
busy to do; in short, I suppose some of the ambitious
lady leaders of our time would call it playing second
fiddle. Yes, that is it; but there must be second fiddles
in an orchestra, and it's fortunate that I have precisely
the talent for playing one, and my doctrine is that the
second fiddle well played is quite as good as the first.
What would the first be without it?

After all, in this great fuss about the men's sphere and
the women's, isn't the women's ordinary work just as important
and great in its way? For, you see, it's what the
men with all their greatness can't do, for the life of them.
I can go a good deal further in Harry's sphere than he
can in mine. I can judge about the merits of a translation
from the French, of criticise an article or story, a
great deal better than he can settle the difference between
the effect of tucking and inserting in a dress, or of cherry
and solferino in curtains. Harry appreciates a room
prettily got up as well as any man, but how to get it up
—all the shades of color and niceties of arrangement, the
thousand little differences and agreements that go to it—
he can't comprehend. So this man and woman question
is just like the quarrel between the mountain and the
squirrel in Emerson's poem, where “Bun” talks to the
mountain:

I am quite satisfied that, first and last, I shall crack a
good many nuts for Harry. Not that I am satisfied with
a mere culinary or housekeeping excellence, or even an
artistic and poetic skill in making home lovely; I do want
a sense of something noble and sacred in life—something

to satisfy a certain feeling of the heroic that always made
me unhappy and disgusted with my aimless fashionable
girl career. I always sympathized with Ida, and admired
her because she had force enough to do something that
she thought was going to make the world better. It is
better to try and fail with such a purpose as hers than
never to try at all; and in that point of view I sympathize
with the whole woman movement, though I see no
place for myself in it. But my religion, poor as it is, has
always given this excitement to me: I never could see
how one could profess to be a Christian at all and not
live a heroic life—though I know I never have. When I
hear in church of the “glorious company of the apostles,”
the “goodly fellowship of the prophets,” the “noble army
of martyrs,” I have often such an uplift—and the tears
come to my eyes, and then my life seems so poor and
petty, so frittered away in trifles. Then the communion
service of our church always impresses me as something
so serious, so profound, that I have wondered how I dared
go through with it; and it always made me melancholy and
dissatisfied with myself. To offer one's soul and body
and spirit to God a living sacrifice surely ought to mean
something that should make one's life noble and heroic,
yet somehow it didn't do so with mine.

It was one thing that drew me to Harry, that he
seemed to me an earnest, religious man, and I told him
when we were first engaged that he must be my guide;
but he said no, we must go hand in hand, and guide each
other, and together we would try to find the better way.
Harry is very good to me in being willing to go with me
to my church. I told him I was weak in religion at any
rate, and all my associations with good and holy things
were with my church, and I really felt afraid to trust myself
without them. I have tried going to his sort of
services with him, but these extemporaneous prayers

don't often help me. I find myself weighing and considering
in my own mind whether that is what I really do
feel or ask; and if one is judging or deciding one can't be
praying at the same time. Now and then I hear a good
man who so wraps me up in his sympathies, and breathes
such a spirit of prayer as carries me without effort, and
that is lovely; but it is so rare a gift! In general I long
for the dear old prayers of my church, where my poor
little naughty heart has learned the way and can go on
with full consent without stopping to think.

So Harry and I have settled on attending an Episcopal
mission church in our part of the city. Its worshipers
are mostly among the poor, and Harry thinks we might
do good by going there. Our rector is a young Mr. St.
John, a man as devoted as any of the primitive Christians.
I never saw anybody go into work for others with more
entire self-sacrifice. He has some property, and he supports
himself and pays about half the expenses of the
mission besides. All this excites Harry's respect, and he
is willing to do himself and have me do all we can to
help him. Both Alice and I, and my younger sisters,
Angelique and Marie, have taken classes in his mission
school, and the girls help every week in a sewing-school,
and, so far as practical work is concerned, everything
moves beautifully. But then, Mr. St. John is very high
church and very stringent in his notions, and Harry,
who is ultra-liberal, says he is good, but narrow; and
so when they are together I am quite nervous about
them. I want Mr. St. John to appear well to Harry,
and I want Harry to please Mr. St. John. Harry is
æsthetic and likes the church services, and is ready
to go as far as anybody could ask in the way of interesting
and beautiful rites and ceremonies, and he likes
antiquities and all that, and so to a certain extent they
get on nicely; but come to the question of church

authority, and Lloyd Garrison and all the radicals are
not more untamable. He gets quite wild, and frightens
me lest dear Mr. St. John should think him an infidel.
And, in fact, Harry has such a sort of latitudinarian way
of hearing what all sorts of people have to say, and admitting
bits of truth here and there in it, as sometimes
makes me rather uneasy. He talks with these Darwinians
and scientific men who have an easy sort of matter-of-course
way of assuming that the Bible is nothing but
an old curiosity-shop of by-gone literature, and is so
tolerant in hearing all they have to say, that I quite burn
to testify and stand up for my faith—if I knew enough to
do it; but I really feel afraid to ask Mr. St. John to help
me, because he is so set and solemn, and confines himself
to announcing that thus and so is the voice of the
church; and you see that don't help me to keep up my
end with people that don't care for the church.

But, Mother dear, isn't there some end to toleration;
ought we Christians to sit by and hear all that is dearest
and most sacred to us spoken of as a by-gone superstition,
and smile assent on the ground that everybody must
be free to express his opinions in good society? Now,
for instance, there is this young Dr. Campbell, whom
Harry is in treaty with for articles on the brain and
nervous system—a nice, charming, agreeable fellow, and
a perfect enthusiast in science, and has got so far that
love or hatred or inspiration or heroism or religion is
nothing in his view but what he calls “cerebration”—he
is so lost and absorbed in cerebration and molecules, and
all that sort of thing, that you feel all the time he is observing
you to get facts about some of his theories as they
do the poor mice and butterflies they experiment with.

The other day he was talking, in his taking-for-granted,
rapid way, about the absurdity of believing in
prayer, when I stopped him squarely, and told him that

he ought not to talk in that way; that to destroy faith in
prayer was taking away about all the comfort that poor,
sorrowful, oppressed people had. I said it was just like
going through a hospital and pulling all the pillows from
under the sick people's heads because there might be a
more perfect scientific invention by and by, and that I
thought it was cruel and hard-hearted to do it. He
looked really astonished, and asked me if I believed in
prayer. I told him our Saviour had said, “Ask, and ye
shall receive,” and I believed it. He seemed quite
astonished at my zeal, and said he didn't suppose
any really cultivated people now-a-days believed those
things. I told him I believed everything that Jesus
Christ said, and thought he knew more than all the philosophers,
and that he said we had a Father that loved us
and cared for us, even to the hairs of our heads, and that
I shouldn't have courage to live if I didn't believe that.
Harry says I did right to speak up as I did. Dr. Campbell
don't seem to be offended with me, for he comes
here more than ever. He is an interesting fellow, full of
life and enthusiasm in his profession, and I like to hear
him talk.

But here I am, right in the debatable land between
faith and no faith. On the part of a great many of the
intelligent, good men whom Harry, for one reason or
other, invites to our house, and wants me to be agreeable
to, are all shades of opinion, of half faith, and no faith,
and I don't wish to hush free conversation, or to be treated
like a baby who will cry if they make too much noise; and
then on the other hand is Mr. St. John—whom I regard
with reverence on account of his holy, self-denying life—
who stands so definitely entrenched within the limits of the
church, and does not in his own mind ever admit a doubt
of anything which the church has settled; and between them
and Harry and all I don't know just what I ought to do.

I am sure, if there is a man in the world who means
in all things to live the Christian life, it's Harry. There
is no difference between him and Mr. St. John there.
He is ready for any amount of self-sacrifice, and goes
with Mr. St. John to the extent of his ability in his
efforts to do good; and yet he really does not believe a
great many things that Mr. St. John thinks are Christian
doctrines. He says he believes only in the wheat, and
not in the chaff, and that it is only the chaff that will be
blown away in these modern discussions. With all this,
I feel nervous and anxious, and sometimes wish I could
go right into some good, safe, dark church, and pull
down all the blinds, and shut all the doors, and keep out
all the bustle of modern thinking, and pray, and meditate,
and have a lovely, quiet time.

Mr. St. John lends me from time to time some of his
ritualistic books; and they are so refined and scholarly,
and yet so devout, that Harry and I are quite charmed
with their tone; but I can't help seeing that, as Harry
says, they lead right back into the Romish church—and
by a way that seems enticingly beautiful. Sometimes I
think it would be quite delightful to have a spiritual
director who would save you all the trouble of deciding,
and take your case in hand, and tell you exactly what to
do at every step. Mr. St. John, I know, would be just
the person to assume such a position. He is a natural
school-master, and likes to control people, and, although
he is so very gentle, I always feel that he is very stringent,
and that if I once allowed him ascendancy he
would make no allowances. I can feel the “main de fer”
through the perfect gentlemanly polish of his exterior;
but you see I know Harry never would go completely
under his influence, and I shrink from anything that
would divide me from my husband, and so I don't make
any move in that direction.

You see, I write to you all about these matters, for my
mamma is a sweet, good little woman who never troubles
her head with anything in this line, and my god-mother,
Aunt Maria, is a dear worldly old soul, whose heart is
grieved within her because I care so little for the pomps
and vanities. She takes it to heart that Harry and I
have definitely resolved to give up party-going, and all
that useless round of calling and dressing and visiting
that is called “going into society,” and she sometimes
complicates matters by trying her forces to get me into
those old grooves I was so tired of running in. I never
pretend to talk to her of the deeper wants or reasons of
my life, for it would be ludicrously impossible to make
her understand. She is a person over whose mind never
came the shadow of a doubt that she was right in her
views of life; and I am not the person to evangelize her.

Well now, dear Mother, imagine a further complication.
Harry is very anxious that we should have an evening
once a week to receive our friends—an informal, quiet,
sociable, talking evening, on a sort of ideal plan of his,
in which everybody is to be made easy and at home, and
to spend just such a quiet, social hour as at one's own
chimney-corner. But fancy my cares, with all the menagerie
of our very miscellaneous acquaintainces! I
should be like the man in the puzzle that had to get the
fox and geese and corn over in one boat without their
eating each other. Fancy Jim Fellows and Mr. St. John!
Dr. Campbell, with his molecules and cerebration, talking
to my little Quaker dove, with her white wings and simple
faith, or Aunt Maria and mamma conversing with a
Jewish Rabbi! I believe our family have a vague impression
that Jews are disreputable, however gentlemanly
and learned; and I don't know but Mr. St. John would
feel shocked at him. Nevertheless, our Rabbi is a very
excellent German gentleman, and one of the most interesting

talkers I have heard. Oh! then there are our
rococo antiquities across the street, Miss Dorcas Vanderheyden
and her sister. What shall I do with them all?
Harry has such boundless confidence in my powers of
doing the agreeable that he seems to think I can, out of
this material, make a most piquant and original combination.
I have an awful respect for the art de tenir salon,
and don't wonder that among our artistic French neighbors
it got to be a perfect science. But am I the woman
born to do it in New York?

Well, there's no way to get through the world but to
keep doing, and to attack every emergency with courage.
I shall do my possible, and let you know of my success.