Thomas Wentworth Higginson, June 1862

Worcester, June, 1862

Mrs. Howell, of Philadelphia, a most attractive woman whom I met last year, is there [Princeton] already. She wrote Milton's verses on his blindness which were included in a London edition of his works, and there is a mild, chronic, Quakerly flirtation between her and Whittier, who wrote in the April “Atlantic” a charming poem about a ride with her at Princeton last year. She is a fine-looking woman of forty-five, but the hotel scandal of last year was that she wears what are called plumpers in her cheeks to preserve the roundness of early years, and though I hold this a libel, still the overwhelming majority of last year's Princetonians believe it. Miss Betsey Sturgis, that arbiter of fashion, says plumpers are very common in Philadelphia and she doesn't doubt Mrs. H. wears them. Nature has plumped the cheerful B. S., but there is no telling what other beautifying appliances may not be purchased with Mrs. Cushing's bequest.

SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 145