ome any
woman's heart. I have been neither much wiser nor much foolisher than
all the shes in the world, only much happier--the difference is in the
happiness. Certainly I am not likely to repent of having given myself
to him. I cannot, for all the pain received from another quarter, the
comfort for which is that my conscience is pure of the sense of having
broken the least known duty, and that the same consequence would
follow any marriage of any member of my family with any possible man
or woman. I look to time, and reason, and natural love and pity, and
to the justification of the events acting through all; I look on so
and hope, and in the meanwhile it has been a great comfort to have had
not merely the indulgence but the approbation and sympathy of most
of my old personal friends--oh, such kind letters; for instance,
yesterday one came from dear Mrs. Martin, who has known me, she and
her husband, since the very beginning of my womanhood, and both of
them are acute, thinking people, with heads as strong as their hearts.
I in my haste left England without a word to them, for which they
might naturally have reproached me; instead of which they write to say
that never _for a moment_ have they doubted my having acted for the
best and happiest, and to assure me that, having sympathised with me
in every sorrow and trial, they delightedly feel with me in the new
joy; nothing could be more cordially kind. See how I write to you as
if I could speak--all these little things which are great things when
seen in the light. Also R, and I are not in the least tired of one
another notwithstanding the very perpetual _tete-a-tete_ into which
we have fallen, and which (past the first fortnight) would be rather a
trial in many cases. Then our housekeeping may end perhaps in being a
proverb among the nations, for at the beginning it makes Mrs. Jameson
laugh heartily. It disappoints her theories, she admits--finding that,
albeit poets, we abstain from burning candles at both ends at once,
just as if we did statistics and historical abstracts by nature
instead. And do not think that the trouble falls on me. Even the
pouring out of the coffee is a divided labour, and the ordering of the
dinner is quite out of my hands. As for me, when I am so good as to
let myself be carried upstairs, and so angelical as to sit still on
the sofa, and so considerate, moreover, as _not_ to put my foot into
a puddle, why _my_ duty is considered done to a perfe