Friends Apart
SIR,—Your reviewer of Lady Birkenhead's Illustrious Friends says that my grandmother, Lady Millais, killed with a slanderous letter to Mrs. La Touche the slight hope Ruskin had of marriage to her daughter. This letter, written in response to an urgent appeal from Mrs. La Touche, who was dis- traught over her daughter's infatuation for Ruskin, was not slanderous. It was a frank account of my grandmother's six years of distress and suffering as the wife of Ruskin.
Ruskin first proposed to Rose La Touche when she was eighteen and she told him he must wait until she was twenty-one. She had been subject as a child to melancholy moods and when Ruskin again proposed she was ill, very restless and in a state of religious mania. Two years later he again proposed and this time she told him she could never marry him. She slowly faded away and died three years later. Three years after her death Ruskin had the first of a series of attacks of madness. My grand- mother's letter, written after Rose had postponed her answer for the second time, may have in- fluenced her final decision, but a marriage between that frail girl, prey to melancholy and religious mania, and a man who was shortly to be attacked by madness would have been even more disastrous
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