He sought her acquaintance, and they were married. Her treasured conscience did not prevent her from noting the jealousy of her young friends. A generous mind, perhaps, would rather itself suffer jealousy than be quick in suspecting, or complacent in causing, or precise in setting it down. But Mrs. Hutchinson doubtless offered up the envy of her companions in homage to her Puritan lover's splendour. His austerity did not hinder him from wearing his "fine, thick-set head of hair" in long locks that were an offence to many of his own sect, but, she says, "a great ornament to him." But for herself she has some dissimulated vanities. She was negligent of dress, and when, after much waiting and many devices, her suitor first saw her, she was "not ugly in a careless riding-habit." As for him, "in spite of all her indifference, she was surprised (she writes) with some unusual liking in her soul when she saw this gentleman, who had hair, eyes, shape, and countenance enough to beget love in any one." He married her as soon as she could leave her chamber, when she was so deformed by small-pox that "the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look at her; but God recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her." The following are some of the admirable sentences that prove Lucy Hutchinson a woman of letters in a far more serious sense than our own time uses. One phrase has a Stevenson-like character, a kind of gesture of language; this is where she praises her husband's "handsome management of love." {1} She thus prefaces her description of her honoured lord: "If my treacherous memory have not lost the dearest treasure that ever I committed to its trust--." She boasts of her country in lofty phrase: "God hath, as it were, enclosed a people here, out of the waste common of the world." And again of her husband: "It will be as hard to say which was the predominant virtue in him as which is so in its own nature." "He had made up his accounts with life and death, and fixed his purpose to entertain both honourably." "The heat of his youth a little inclined him to the passion of anger, and the goodness of his nature to those of love and grief; but reason was never dethroned by them, but continued governor and moderator of his soul." She describes sweetly certain three damsels who had "conceived a kindness" for her lord, their susceptibility, their willingness, their "admirable tempting beauty," and "such excellent good-nature as would have thawed a rock of ice"; but she adds no less beautifully, "It was not his time to love." In her widowhood she remembered that she had been commanded "not to grieve at the common rate of women"; and this is the lovely phrase of her grief: "As his shadow, she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken to that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing."