Wonderful letters, of course! Why don't women publish volumes of their letters, as men collect their scattered essays?
There is no writing in the world more immediately, conqueringly personal than a really clever woman's letters; and they are not always compromising.
Isabel's letters were the perfection of self-expression.

Her handwriting swept across the page just as she would walk down a street, at once eager and yet stately and subtle-rhythmed; the shape of some of the words reminded you of her hats,--hats everyone thought she paid guineas for, but which she made for herself at a cost perhaps of five shillings: hats which were Paris with a touch of fairyland, somewhere an unobtrusive feather of the fantastic, somewhere a personal magic in the inimitable twist or lie of a bow--; her face looked out at you from a _g_ or an _x_, a gesture flashed back to you in a sudden distinguished stroke of the pen, and her voice was somewhere, everywhere, among the words, like a violin.
Without any apparent literary device she contrived to make you, while you read her letters, do what she was doing, see what she was seeing, and form, as though acted on by some magic property in the words, pictures of all she told you.
One piece of news you would not expect her to have told.

I have said that women are both executioners of the tiresome.

In this Isabel, I fear, was no exception to her sex.

Like most independent girls in London, she had a little theatre-guard of devoted men friends, who took it in turn to companion her to plays or picture-galleries; and these, with admirable tact, she contrived to keep in, to them, the unsatisfactory relation of brothers.