lt that
you have believed in me and loved me; and, for the sake of the past
and of the present, your affection and your esteem are more to me than
I could afford to lose, even in these changed and happy circumstances.
So I thank you once more, my dear kind friends, I thank you both--I
never shall forget your goodness. I feel it, of course, the more
deeply, in proportion to the painful disappointment in other
quarters.... Am I, bitter? The feeling, however, passes while I write
it out, and my own affection for everybody will wait patiently to
be 'forgiven' in the proper form, when everybody shall be at leisure
properly. Assuredly, in the meanwhile, however, my case is not to be
classed with other cases--what happened to me could not have happened,
perhaps, with any other family in England.... I hate and loathe
everything too which is clandestine--we _both_ do, Robert and I; and
the manner the whole business was carried on in might have instructed
the least acute of the bystanders. The flowers standing perpetually
on my table for the last two years were brought there by one hand,
as everybody knew; and really it would have argued an excess of
benevolence in an unmarried man with quite enough resources in London,
to pay the continued visits he paid to me without some strong motive
indeed. Was it his fault that he did not associate with everybody in
the house as well as with me? He desired it; but no--that was not to
be. The endurance of the pain of the position was not the least proof
of his attachment to me. How I thank you for believing in him--how
grateful it makes me! He will justify to the uttermost that faith. We
have been married two months, and every hour has bound me to him more
and more; if the beginning was well, still better it is now--that is
what he says to me, and I say back again day by day. Then it is an
'advantage,' to have an inexhaustible companion who talks wisdom of
all things in heaven and earth, and shows besides as perpetual a
good humour and gaiety as if he were--a fool, shall I say? or a
considerable quantity more, perhaps. As to our domestic affairs, it is
not to _my_ honour and glory that the 'bills' are made up every week
and paid more regularly 'than hard beseems,' while dear Mrs. Jameson
laughs outright at our miraculous prudence and economy, and declares
that it is past belief and precedent that we should not burn the
candles at both ends, and the next moment will have it that we remind
her