The retiring habits I have spoken of had been fostered partly by the delicate health which shrank from exertion; sometimes by some strong, absorbing interest, and especially by an entire absence of belief in any social gifts of her own. The excitements of personal vanity, the craving for recognition, for intellectual distinction, ambition, in short, of any kind, that beset other minds, seemed not to touch her. She maintained a serene independence, only asking perfect freedom for a life of reading, thought, and reverie, in a beautiful country home, subject but to those domestic ties which had always formed an essential part of her existence. She loved to dream, but her dreams were not of herself so much as of others, of those she knew and of strangers, even of persons and scenes in the historic past; while in the living, larger world that she would not enter, she had an ever-growing interest. Social questions and world problems occupied her mind to an extent which no one who did not know her well, or had not read those writings she habitually kept to herself, could have suspected.
Those who did know her can testify to her
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