Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/70

46 down in the family, was of her asking a prim old Chief Justice of the Supremest sort, when the plum pudding on fire was offered—"Oh, Sir, may one eat of hell fire with impunity here?" To Susan at home she writes, "Would you rather I would write you what I am doing here, or whom I am loving there?"

She was charmed by the sweet softness of the spring, soft as summer there—the darling maple trees in bloom and grass green in sunny places—and could hardly realize it was winter still at home. It makes the grass spring in her heart, she writes, and the linnet sing to know that one she loves is coming there, and for one look of this friend she would give all the pomp, the court, the etiquette of the world. She becomes perversely fixed in her own notion that those who are of the earth will not enter heaven. The jostle and turmoil and scramble confuse her. She met many people, and after the fashion of the day walked a long time up and down in the hall of the hotel with some of them in the evenings. She was excused from some of the gaiety on the plea of fatigue, but at that was far gayer than she had ever been before in her life. Her passivity to her father's wish comes out in a postscript to the effect:

We think we shall go to Philadelphia next week, though Father has not decided. Eliza writes every day and seems impatient to have us. I don't know how long we shall stay there or in New York. Father has not said.

It was on a visit to this same Eliza, in Philadelphia, that Emily met the fate she had instinctively shunned. Even now, after the many slow years she has been removed from us in the body, her spirit hinders the baring of that chapter in her life which has been so universally