Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/106

76 of the sons, were those nearest. Most of them she seldom saw; they hardly expected her to see them. Royalty was never more intact, though her methods were so simple, her spirit guileless of it as guile. Mrs. John Anthon, with just a touch of Irish blood in her veins, was a gay madcap of a girl, solemnized by cruel sorrow later in life, but always witty and of blessed sympathy and humor. From their first meeting, when as Kate Scott she was living in the old Fenimore Cooper mansion at Cooperstown, Emily's heart "voted for her." Living abroad as she did, she brought the very breath of life during her rare visits, and was one of the dwindling few Emily never refused to see, going over to her brother's home when she was there, long after her earlier stages of seclusion.

Maria Whitney was a friend of her maturer years, but another sacredly treasured one. Their visits were also in the darkened library, hand in hand on the little sofa by the fire, and with them, two intellects met as equals. Miss Whitney was the sister of Professor William Whitney, of Yale, and another brother was Professor Josiah Whitney, of Harvard. She lived at Northampton in the original Jonathan Edwards house, under the majestic Jonathan Edwards elms, and was in many ways Emily's antithesis—keen, scientific, agnostic, schooled in German criticism, a cool thinker, influenced by her brother's ideas, saying calmly: "It is a great grief to me that I cannot accept the Christian faith"; subjected to church admonishment for wearing a red silk petticoat on her return from years of study in Europe; later a professor of old German in Smith College, a woman of unusual attainments and profound convictions, rational, calm,