The furniture reached Elmwood the day but one before Guy started for his
bride, and Julia Hamilton, who was then at the Towers, helped me arrange
the room, which is a perfect little gem and cannot fail to please, I am
sure. I wonder Guy never fancied Julia Hamilton. Oh, if he only had done
so I should not have as many misgivings as I now have nor dread the
future so much. Julia is sensible and twenty years old, and lives in
Boston, and comes of a good family, and is every way suitable; but when
did a man ever choose the woman whom his sister thought suitable for
him? And Guy is like other men, and this is his wedding day; and after a
trip to Montreal, and Quebec, and Boston, and New York, and Saratoga,
they are coming home, and I am to give a grand reception and then
subside, I suppose, into the position of the "old maid sister who will
be dreadfully in the way."


SEPTEMBER 15, 18--.

Just three months since I opened my Journal, and, on glancing over what
I wrote on Guy's wedding day, I find that in one respect at least I was
unjust to the little creature who is now my sister and calls me Miss
Frances. Not by a word or look has she shown the least inclination to
assume the position of mistress of the house, nor does she seem to think
me at all in the way; but that she considers me quite an antediluvian I
am certain, for, in speaking of something which happened in 1820, she
asked if I remembered it! And I only three years older than Guy! But
then she once called him a dear old grandfatherly man, and thought it a
good joke that on their wedding tour she was mistaken for his daughter.
She looks so young--not sixteen even; but with those childish blue eyes,
and that innocent, pleading kind of expression, she never can be old.