Susan! I would have come out of Eden to open the door for you if I had known you were there. You must knock with a trumpet as Gabriel does, whose hands are small as yours. I knew he knocked and went away—I did not dream you did!
And again:
To see you unfits for stabler meetings. I dare not risk an intemperate moment before a banquet of bran.
The decision to publish "The Single Hound," the poem of their lifetime, was determined by a faded little note of her early twenties:
Dear Sue—I like your praise because I know it knows. If I could make you and Austin proud some day, a long way off, 'twould give me taller feet.
She never told her family of her writing, and this is the only mention of any secret ambition to have her work known even on a day "a long way off." The first poem dated, that she sent to Sister Sue, was in 1848, and probably the last word she ever wrote was her reply to a message from her—
My answer is an unmitigated Yes, Sue.
