'MY POOR LITTLE DEAR,--Are you already beginning to be miserable about what people will think? Then, indeed, your days of joy are numbered. If I were to write to you fifty times I could only repeat what I have always written. You are not wise, and you are doing everything you ought not to do. _Of two people who are married, there is always one who has the delusion that he or she is necessary and delightful to the life of the other. The other generally thinks just the contrary._ The result is not peace. This gay, charming, handsome son of Rome has become your entire world, but don't suppose for a moment, my child, that you will ever be his. It is not in reason, not in Nature, that you should be. _If_ you have the intelligence, the tact, and the forbearance required, you _may_ become his friend and counsellor, but I fear you never will have these. You fret, you weep, and you understand nothing of the masculine temperament. "I see snakes," as the Americans observe; and you will not have either the coolness or the wisdom required to scotch a snake, much less to kill it. Once for all, my poor pet, go cheerfully to Paris, Trouville, and all the pleasure places in the world. Affect enjoyment if you feel it not, and try to remember, beyond everything, that affection is not to be retained or revived by either coercion or lamentation. Once dead, it is not to be awakened by all the "crooning" of its mourner. It is a corpse, for ever and aye. Myself, I fail to see how you could expect a young Italian, who has all the habits of the great world, and the memories of his _vie de garçon_, to be cheerful or contented in a wet June in an isolated English country house, with nobody to look at but yourself. Believe me, my dear child, it is the inordinate vanity of a woman which makes her imagine that she can be sufficient for her husband. Nothing but vanity. The cleverer a woman is, the more fully she recognises her own insufficiency for the amusement of a man, and the more carefully (if she be wise) does she take care that this deficiency in her shall never be forced upon his observation. Now, if you shut a man up with you in a country house, with the rain raining every day, as in Longfellow's poem, you do force it upon him most conspicuously. If you were not his wife, I daresay he would not tire of you, and he might even prefer a grey sky to a blue one. But as his wife!--oh, my dear, why, why don't you try and understand what a terrible penalty-weight you carry in the race? Write and tell me all about it. I shall be anxious. I am so afraid, my sweet little sister, that you think love is all moonlight and kisses, and forget that there are clouds in the sky and quarrels on earth. May Heaven save you from both. _P.S._--Do remember that this same love requires just as delicate handling as a cobweb does. If a rough touch break the cobweb, all the artists in the world can't mend it. There is a wholesome truth for you. If you prevent his going to