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beauty. Mrs. [[Bolune?]] very refined and charming. Merrill stiff (for the father of six children I thought). Such a clamor at table! Impossible to convert. Every one has to talk loud.

Roger the only bashful child and John the most attractive looking and endearing. Changed my mind altogether later on. Thought James an artfully interpretive boy with his fathers faculty of observation, and Robert about the most satisfying one of them all. So direct and manly.

Writing in a diary is very unsatisfactory. There is no incentive. To do anything purely for ones self is a bore.

Does Bessie, I wonder, really like me much? I feel las if the fact that I didn't like her brother at all, nor find the point beyond constraint with her mother, nor think her cousin pleasing beyond the conventional phrase, nor her sister inspiring in any way

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shape nor manner. As if all that had made some slight barrier between herself and me. But why! It is only between her & me to judge. And I love and admire her and wish her to love me. And she says she does and I am not sure.

Words are such queer things. "Invention to hide men's thoughts". It is more easy to be conventional [[strikethrough]] that [[/strikethrough]] than to try and say what you think. But Bessie is not conventional. She knows what tone affection is if anyone does. I can believe what she says! [[?]] to be expected that a woman with five children and one that has died, can come very near to the interests and thoughts of a girl not just out of her own family. And yet a man can [[?]] himself enough —— No! everything is individual. There is no such thing as [[?]] [[?]] and no use wasting ones time over them.  

Or else it is that I am wholly incapable of seeing the whole of a thing.