From collection Frances Willard Journal Transcripts
trustees who torment & solicitors who saddle her with lies & bills; in her son as to his career, he being determined to leave Oxford& go to Egypt & India-never studying any more save only the Book of the World; in her temperance society as to its management, the criss cross, the jealousies and misadventures being a perpetual source of friction-not as of old, because all are good & mean well, but the friction of temperament. And as forme these heavy skies and my sense of ageing & stiffening; the emptying of the world of kindred; the contradiction of "the movement" make me tired.
December 21, 1893
Dear Cossie threatened with grip [FEW sp]-temperature over 100 [sign for degrees]-did not leave her suite of rooms but had no end of business people come to them all day long & was up till midnight over the Duchess' memorandum. These things are beyond me but I see more & more that money makes hatred-alienates & spoils. It is the pivot on which the world turns because with it everything in the world can be bought-except thought, purpose, love-"when these are all we want." C. & I dinedat 9 PM up in my room & as we talked of the heavy rut of routine & that we are never out of it & never likely to be-we fell upon each other's necks and cried-
December 22, 1893
The dreariest drippingiest of English December days. Somey & his Oxford friends have about 20 men & boys to beat the bush while they aim the deadly tube & they've killed over 500 pheasants in spite of the wet wh. they don't mind tho S. has a bad cough bro't from Athabasca. I went 50 times around the gt hall on bike-Leaney behind-bien entendu! Cossie has had "tradesman" from Ledbury with Christmas things; Evangelist who carries her chapel & Y work-a nice girl hated by "the Church." She has had Capt Pollen with the Duchess' memorandum business. Coleman her steward; Woodford her butler; Ellis her housekeeper & so on. I have written no end by way of Leaney's pencil-working up "Neal Dow's day"-replying to interminable correspondence in all parts of Christendom and reading [entry continues on in space for 12/23] that wretched fellow Schopenhauer.-Sorry to have found the book in castle hall- belonging to Young England fin de siecle. We are going to publish the "Woman Chapter" to show what can be thought & said by an utterly selfish, distorted man with what the editor of his book seriously announces in the preface-viz. "S. is not joking in his chapter on Woman!" Hooray! That sentence tells it all. Ten thousand women earnest & brave brought their whole lives to make that sentence necessary-Hooray!
December 24, 1893
