Benella has improved wonderfully in the last twenty-four hours, and
I am trying to give her some training for her future duties. We can
never forget our native land so long as we have her with us, for she
is a perfect specimen of the Puritan spinster, though too young in
years, perhaps, for determined celibacy. Do you know, we none of us
mentioned wages in our conversations with her? Fortunately she
seems more alive to the advantages of foreign travel than to the
filling of her empty coffers. (By the way, I have written to the
purser of the ship that she crossed in, to see if I can recover the
sixty or seventy dollars she left behind her.) Her principal idea
in life seems to be that of finding some kind of work that will be
'interestin'' whether it is lucrative or not.

I don't think she will be able to dress hair, or anything of that
sort--save in the way of plain sewing, she is very unskilful with
her hands; and she will be of no use as courier, she is so
provincial and inexperienced. She has no head for business
whatever, and cannot help Francesca with the accounts. She recites
to herself again and again, 'Four farthings make one penny,
twelvepence make one shilling, twenty shillings make one pound'; but
when I give her a handful of money and ask her for six shillings and
sixpence, five and three, one pound two, or two pound ten, she
cannot manage the operation. She is docile, well mannered,
grateful, and really likable, but her present philosophy of life is
a thing of shreds and patches. She calls it 'the science,' as if
there were but one; and she became a convert to its teachings this
past winter, while living in the house of a woman lecturer in Salem,
a lecturer, not a 'curist,' she explains. She attended to the door,
ushered in the members of classes, kept the lecture-room in order,