(Papers of the Edmondson/Jacobs Family, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries)
4 June 1891
My sweet Pink:
If you, who are at home and have each other to love and kiss and caress, want to see me, what, think you, are my feelings who, being amongst comparative strangers, can kiss and caress none of them, though I must love them all?
One meets so many unlovely and unlovable people that it is well-nigh impossible to love them. But one must look deeper than the unloveliness which is apparent to the eyes and search for that lovely thing which god has planted in every human being, the soul. It is not an easy task to perform, but the effort required lends added pleasure when the guest has been successful.
It had never come to me so forcibly, until your last letter reached me, sister mine, that time has developed in you that lovely state, womanhood. You are a thoughtful woman, so you can not have arrived at this point in your life without considering the powers and responsibilities of the position. What power for good or evil a woman possesses, perhaps only man knows; but it is wonderful, far-reaching, almost awful. Even your small experience in the world must have taught you that, and must have taught you too that it is not an easy thing to live out one's high ideal, to do always what will result in the greatest good to the greatest number.
You have already had disappointments, trials, troubles, we all have them before passing twenty years here. Meet them in the future with the assurance that his loving arms uphold you, meet them and overcome them with the consciousness of vying his handmaiden in the execution of some work of his. A little sentence from Drummond's "The Greatest Thing in the World" has helped me so often that I do not hesitate to commend it to you. It runs "I shall not pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it on neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."
I wrote to Bosie this afternoon and both letters will arrive in Easton together. Enclosed in this, please find a money order for ten dollars. If you could smuggle five of it into Bosie's purse for me, I should thank you. If you can not, keep it with my love.
Your loving brother,
W.V.E. Jacobs