File:Thomas Butler Gunn Diaries- Volume 9, page 220, October 11, 1858.jpg

that troubled you — that on the great question of Christ’s divinity you were by no means at rest — it would simply appal [sic] him [William Conworth]. The whole family have been reared in the narrowest of circles. Mrs Conworth, dead some two or three years ago, was her husband’s housekeeper before marriage. She was “religious” and had one idea — duty — which in her vocabularly meant daily immolation. This idea the daughter [Sarah Conworth] has inherited, and now acts upon it. Only Englishwoman are capable of this, and it’s at once touching and horrible. They have Protestantized the Papish idea that it’s their duty to suffer, they are timid, unresisting — or almost so — and invariably believers — believers who think all questioning shocking impiety. Their affection towards the members of their family are deep and morbid — they submit to petty selfishnesses and tyranny. I don’t say Sarah Conworth has this to endure, though what else I have just written applies to her. She is painfully diffident, speaks but little and that in a low, timid voice. Her desire to oblige, to be kind and hospitable, makes one uneasy — you would like to set her at rest, to see her confident, cheerful — to hear her join freely in conversation. Some few times when she has warmed up into it, she talked sense and womanly feeling. Once, in a talk on slavery, when George [Bolton] took the rascally inferiority-of-the-negro-and-what’s-to-be-done side, indulging in quiet, Boltonian, masculine grinning at the girls natural, honest, sympathetic convictions based in human feeling and abhorrence of injustice, I delighted her and brought her out more than usual by strong talk on the right side of the question. “There, George!” said she. I hate to see a woman pooh-