like woman, plain-hearted, and
prudent. The husband an honest, industrious man. And they live in good
understanding with each other: a proof with me that their hearts are
right; for where a married couple live together upon ill terms, it is a
sign, I think, that each knows something amiss of the other, either with
regard to temper or morals, which if the world knew as well as
themselves, it would perhaps as little like them as such people like each
other. Happy the marriage, where neither man nor wife has any wilful or
premeditated evil in their general conduct to reproach the other with!--
for even persons who have bad hearts will have a veneration for those who
have good ones.

Two neat rooms, with plain, but clean furniture, on the first floor, are
mine; one they call the dining-room.

There is, up another pair of stairs, a very worthy widow-lodger, Mrs.
Lovick by name; who, although of low fortunes, is much respected, as Mrs.
Smith assures me, by people of condition of her acquaintance, for her
piety, prudence, and understanding. With her I propose to be well
acquainted.

I thank you, my dear, for your kind, your seasonable advice and
consolation. I hope I shall have more grace given me than to despond, in
the religious sense of the word: especially as I can apply to myself the
comfort you give me, that neither my will, nor my inconsiderateness, has
contributed to my calamity. But, nevertheless, the irreconcilableness of
my relations, whom I love with an unabated reverence; my apprehensions of
fresh violences, [this wicked man, I doubt, will not let me rest]; my
being destitute of protection; my youth, my sex, my unacquaintedness with
the world, subjecting me to insults; my reflections on the scandal I have
given, added to the sense of the indignities I have received from a man,
of whom I deserved not ill; all together will undoubtedly bring on the
effect that cannot be undesirable to me.--The situation; and, as I
presume to imagine, from principles which I hope will, in due time, and
by due reflection, set me above the sense of all worldly disappointments.

At present, my head is much disordered. I have not indeed enjoyed it
with any degree of clearness, since the violence done to that, and to my
heart too, by the wicked arts of the abandoned creatures I was cast
among.

I must have more conflicts. At times I find myself not subdued enough to
my condition. I will welcome those conflicts as they come,