Letter from Kate Greenwood, Lymington, to Jessy Greenwood, 1892 July 26 : autograph manuscript signed.

Writing that she has had no time to herself to write letters, as the Patmore's don't like her to retire to her room for even a few minutes, and "if I rise to leave the room, I am asked where I am going, and why? and can't I do it down there and so on."; complaining that she sleeps poorly; acknowledging that the Patmore's are kind, but describing them as officious and "always moving you on. Whatever you are doing they want you to go and do something else"; adding that reading is "out of the question" and "If Mrs. Patmore is not yet up I am asked to go and sit with her; if she is, she talks to me straight on"; noting that a Capuching Brother is coming to stay with them, "of the kind who goes around barefoot even when out for a holiday ... I don't much care about that addition to the party"; going on to write that "Mr. Patmore did not behave at all well, I consider, to me, in his contemptuous ways of talking. ... He is a terrible man for a poet. Personally he cannot make me incomfortable intellectually; he has no terrors - it would be a discredit to my upbringing if he had", describing his expressed opinions as "childish", and recounting a conversation in the course of which she challenged him and subsequently "let him off having to confess that he was wrong before his women-folk", noting "He knew too that I had let him off, and he has been much nicer and more civil to me since.", and remarking, "A man has no right to assume that another man's daughters are fools."; observing that "Piffie is improved in many ways" but "they talk to him sometimes as if he was a baby, and he is ten.", and that "Gertrude looks very ill to me ... But no notice is taken of her, and in fact the girls are rarely seem to speak to Mr. or Mrs. Patmore, or to be spoken to."; recounting some of the tensions and conflicts she witnessed among the members of the Patmore family; describng the situation of the Patmore home as "hideous", with ugly views featuring mud, rotten boats, disused buildings, and rubbish, and an unpleasant smell; describing the Patmores as delusional in their admiration for their home; complaining of being relentlessly "hustled about", writing that Piffie has a cold, and that the Patmore's appear to hope that her father will come to fetch her home.