Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/103

Rh is a meeting of the Woman's Club at 3 Tremont Place, where I read a paper on the Greek Goddesses. That would be a good time for you to come, though I should still rather have you come on some day when I shall not be so much taken up, for my object is to see you, more than to entertain you. I shall be in Boston also during anniversary week, June 25th, or will the Musical Festival in June tempt you? You see I am in earnest. Or don't you need sea air in Summer? Write and tell me something in prose or verse, and I will be less fastidious in future and willing to write clumsy things rather than none. Ever your friend—

P.S. There is an extra meeting at Mrs. Sargent's that day and Mr. Weiss reads an essay. I have a right to invite you and you can merely ring and walk in.

To which she replied in a letter full of gratitude and grace, but as Shakespeare's Imogen might have spoken, "I do not cross my father's ground to any house or town." In August of the same year 1870 he went to see her at Amherst instead. After this until her death their friendship and correspondence continued uninterrupted.

Her cousins Louisa and Fannie Norcross, relatives on her mother's side, were her beloved always. The winters they spent at the Hotel Berkeley in Boston, when she was with them at brief intervals, she never ceased to look back upon lovingly, even wistfully—and they, too, were of her elect from whom she never ran away. Her Southern cousin, Perez Cowan, a Carolinian, was another of her favored relatives, for whom she had a real affection. His softer accent, genial manner relieved of the New England stiffness, loosened her shy tongue and appealed to her eager imagination. His coming was always "a tropic," though she could never be prevailed upon for a return visit upon any of the family "below the frost line."

Her correspondence with Mr. C. H. Clarke, whom she