If I believed what your cynical letter says, I should leave him to-morrow. I would never live through a succession of disillusions and of insults. * * * * * _From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester to the Princess di San Zenone._ Where are your principles? Where are your duties? My dear little girl, you have married him; you must submit to him as he is. Marriages wouldn't last two days if just because the man yawned the woman ran away. Men always yawn. Hitherto, all San Zenone's faults appear to consist in the very pardonable fact that, being an Italian, he is not alive to the charms of bucolic England in rainy weather, and that, being a young man, he wants to see his Paris again. Neither of these seem to me irreparable crimes. Go to Paris and try to enjoy yourself. After all, if his profile be so beautiful, you ought to be sufficiently happy in gazing at it from the back of a _baignoir_. I grant that it is not the highest amatory ideal,--to rush about the boulevards in a daument, and eat delicious little dinners in the cafés, and laugh at Judic or Chaumont afterwards; but _l'amour peut se nicher_ anywhere. And Love won't be any the worse for having his digestion studied by good cooks, and his possible _ennui_ exorcised by good players. You see for yourself that the great passion yawns after a time. Turn back to what you call my cynical letter, and re-read my remarks upon Nature. By the way, I entirely deny that they are cynical. On the contrary, I inculcate on you patience, sweetness of temper, and adaptability to circumstances,--three most amiable qualities. If I were a cynic, I should say to you that Marriage is a Mistake, and two capital letters could hardly emphasize this melancholy truth sufficiently. But, as there are men and women, and, as I before observed, property, in the world, nothing better for the consolidation of rents and freeholds has, as yet, been discovered. I dare say Krapotkine in his prison could devise something better; but they are afraid of him. So we all jog on in the old routine, vaguely conscious that we are all blunderers, but indisposed for such a drastic remedy as would alone cure us. Just you remark to any lawyer that marriage is a mistake, as I have said before, and see what answer you will get. He will certainly reply to you that there is no other way of securing the transmission of property safely. I confess that this view of wealth makes me, for one, a most desperate Radical. Only think, if there were no property, we should all be frisking about in our happy valleys as free and as merry as little kids. I shouldn't now be obliged to put on all my war-paint and beads, like a savage, and go out to a dreadful court dinner, four hours long, because George has a "career" and thinks my suffering advances it. Oh, you happy child, to have nothing worse to do than to rattle down the Bois in a _milord_, and sup off a _matelote_ by the lake with your Romeo!