Ball whom he mentions in the foregoing letter to his mother, and who
seems to have been a most capricious person, insisting on continual
alterations, and one day pleased and the next almost insulting in her
censure:--
MADAM,--Supposing that I was dealing not only with a woman of honor, but,
from her professions, with a Christian, I ventured in my note of the 18th
inst., to make an appeal to your conscience in support of the justness of
my demand of the four hundred dollars still due from you for your
portrait. By your last note I find you are disposed to take an advantage
of that circumstance of which I did not suppose you capable. My sense of
the justness of my demand was so strong, as will appear from the whole
tenor of that note, that I venture this appeal, not imagining that any
person of honor, of the least spark of generous feeling, and more
especially of Christian principle, could understand anything more than
the enforcing my claim by an appeal to that principle which I knew should
be the strongest in a real Christian.
Whilst, however, you have chosen to put a different construction on this
part of the note, and supposed that I left you to say whether you would
pay me anything or nothing, you have (doubtless unconsciously) shown that
your conscience has decided in favor of the whole amount which is my due,
and which I can never voluntarily relinquish.
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