run about the world to get a
fortune, it is for yourself; for the little girl and I will live
without your assistance unless you are with us. I may be termed
proud; be it so, but I will never abandon certain principles of
action.

"The common run of men have such an ignoble way of thinking that if
they debauch their hearts and prostitute their persons, following
perhaps a gust of inebriation, the wife, slave rather, whom they
maintain has no right to complain, and ought to receive the sultan
whenever he deigns to return with open arms, though his have been
polluted by half an hundred promiscuous amours during his absence.

"I consider fidelity and constancy as two distinct things, yet the
former is necessary to give life to the other; and such a degree of
respect do I think due to myself, that if only probity, which is a
good thing in its place, brings you back, never return! for if a
wandering of the heart or even a caprice of the imagination detains
you, there is an end of all my hopes of happiness. I could not
forgive it if I would.

"I have gotten into a melancholy mood, you perceive. You know my
opinion of men in general; you know that I think them systematic
tyrants, and that it is the rarest thing in the world to meet with
a man with sufficient delicacy of feeling to govern desire. When I
am thus sad, I lament that my little darling, fondly as I dote on
her, is a girl. I am sorry to have a tie to a world that for me is
ever sown with thorns.

"You will call this an ill-humored letter, when, in fact, it is
the strongest proof of affection I can give to dread to lose you.
---- has taken such pains to convince me that you must and ought to
stay, that it has inconceivably depressed my spirits. You have
always known my opinion. I have ever declared that two people who
mean to live together ought not to be long separated. If certain
things are more necessary to you than me,--search for them. Say but
one word, and you shall never hear of me more. If not, for God's
sake let us struggle with poverty--with any evil but these
continual inquietudes of business, which I have been told were to
last but a few months, though every day the end appears more
distant! This is the first letter in this strain that I have
determined to forward to yo