each a long letter--she found a packet, of these, tied
round with string. Throwing off her hat and veil, she sat down under
the lamp, and, without an instant's demur, began to read.

First, indeed, she turned to the signature--'Eugenie de Pastourelles.'
Why, pray, should Madame de Pastourelles write these long letters to
another woman's husband? The hands which held them shook with anger
and misery. These pages filled with discussion of art and books, which
had seemed to the woman of European culture, and French associations,
so natural to write, which had been written as the harmless and kindly
occupation of an idle hour, with the shades of Madame de Sevigne and
Madame du Deffand standing by, were messengers of terror and despair
to this ignorant and yet sentimental Westmoreland girl. Why should
they be written at all to _her_ John, her own husband? No nice woman
that she had ever known wrote long letters to married men. What could
have been the object of writing these pages and pages about John's
pictures and John's prospects?--affected stuff!--and what was the
meaning of these appointments to see pictures, these invitations to
St. James's Square, these thanks 'for the kind and charming things you
say'--above all, of the constant and crying omission, throughout these
delicately written sheets, of any mention whatever of Fenwick's wife
and child? But of course for the two correspondents whom these letters
implied, such dull, stupid creatures did not exist.

Ah! but wait a moment. Her eye caught a sentence--then fastened
greedily on the following passage:

'I hardly like to repeat what I said the other day--you will think
me a very intrusive person!--but when you talk of melancholy and
loneliness, of feeling the strain of competition, and the nervous
burden of work, so that you are sometimes tempted to give it up
altogether, I can't help repeating that some day a wife will save you
from all this. I have seen so much of artists!--they of all men
should marry. It is quite a delusion to suppose that art--whatever
art means--is enough for them, or for anybody. Imagination is the most
exhausting of all professions!--and if we women are good for nothing
else we _can_ be cushions--we can "stop a chink and keep the wind
away." So pay no attention, please, to my father's diatribes. You will
very soon be prosperous--sooner perhaps than you think. A _home_ is
what you want.'

Kind and simple sentences!--written so innocently