_me_ ... the two things seemed
clearly incompatible to my understanding.

And now when it comes in a miracle, you wonder at me for looking
twice, thrice, four times, to see if it comes through ivory or _horn_.
You wonder that it should seem to me at first all illusion--illusion
for you,--illusion for me as a consequence. But how natural.

It is true of me--very true--that I have not a high appreciation of
what passes in the world (and not merely the Tomkins-world!) under the
name of love; and that a distrust of the thing had grown to be a habit
of mind with me when I knew you first. It has appeared to me, through
all the seclusion of my life and the narrow experience it admitted
of, that in nothing men--and women too--were so apt to mistake their
own feelings, as in this one thing. Putting _falseness_ quite on one
side, quite out of sight and consideration, an honest mistaking of
feeling appears wonderfully common, and no mistake has such frightful
results--none can. Self-love and generosity, a mistake may come from
either--from pity, from admiration, from any blind impulse--oh, when I
look at the histories of my own female friends--to go no step further!
And if it is true of the _women_, what must the other side be? To see
the marriages which are made every day! worse than solitudes and more
desolate! In the case of the two happiest I ever knew, one of the
husbands said in confidence to a brother of mine--not much in
confidence or I should not have heard it, but in a sort of smoking
frankness,--that he had 'ruined his prospects by marrying'; and the
other said to himself at the very moment of professing an
extraordinary happiness, ... 'But I should have done as well if I had
not married _her_.'

Then for the falseness--the first time I ever, in my own experience,
heard that word which rhymes to glove and comes as easily off and on
(on some hands!)--it was from a man of whose attentions to another
woman I was at that _time her confidante_. I was bound so to silence
for her sake, that I could not even speak the scorn that was in
me--and in fact my uppermost feeling was a sort of horror ... a
terror--for I was very young then, and the world did, at the moment,
look ghastly!

The falseness and the calculations!--why how can you, who are _just_,
_blame women_ ... when you must know what the 'system' of man is
towards them,--and of men not ungenerous otherwise? Why are women to
be blamed if they act as if they had to d