Amidst all the little puritanical words which fall from her _de temps en temps_, she seems to have by nature a quiet fund of gaiety; great indeed must it have been, not to have been wholly overcome by the close confinement in which she has lived, and the anxiety she must have undergone for one whom she certainly loves as well as one human being can love another.
I will not say she idolizes him, because that she would think wrong; but she certainly seems to possess the truest regard and affection for this excellent creature, and, as I said before, has in the most literal sense of those words, no will or shadow of inclination but what is his.
My account of Mrs.Unwin may seem perhaps to you, on comparing my letters, contradictory; but when you consider that I began to write at the first moment that I saw her, you will not wonder.

Her character develops itself by degrees; and though I might lead you to suppose her grave and melancholy, she is not so by any means.

When she speaks upon grave subjects, she does express herself with a puritanical tone, and in puritanical expressions, but on all subjects she seems to have a great disposition to cheerfulness and mirth; and indeed had she not, she could not have gone through all she has.

I must say, too, that she seems to be very well read in the English poets, as appears by several little quotations, which she makes from time to time, and has a true taste for what is excellent in that way." When Cowper became an author he paid the highest respect to Mrs.Unwin as an instinctive critic, and called her his Lord Chamberlain, whose approbation was his sufficient licence for publication.
Life in the Unwin family is thus described by the new inmate;--"As to amusements, I mean what the world calls such, we have none.

The place indeed swarms with them; and cards and dancing are the professed business of almost all the gentle inhabitants of Huntingdon.