"You will remember," says she in this letter, "my resolution to marry for love; you ignored my principle of matrimonial life being all the happier for mutual struggles, helpfulness one towards another; you laughed at the idea of care and trouble being stronger ties between man and wife than hours linked with flowers. Do you remember quizzing my fanciful notion of the evergreen cypress-wreath and the faded rose-garland? Nay, you often said I was too anxious for distinction, for any kind of _eclat_, to marry _only_ for love. You know my story, my orphaned state, my dependence--no, not dependence--my reliance for protection on my kind aunt, and my departure from England. Hither I came; I was honest in my first communication to you; I told you that the admiration of the world had charms for me, which every pretty woman must understand. You scoffed at my world, and I--how I laughed at yours!-- Lighted rooms, conventional forms, worldly tactics, the same circles revolving and re-revolving--Dinner-parties, where the host and hostess sat revelling, not in the society of friends, but in the display of plate, and cookery, and servants--Morning drives through interminable streets, or between tall hedges, or monotonous parks--Evening visits among crowds, where mothers came anxious to outdo their auctioneering compeers in displaying their daughters tricked out for conquest, and where daughters vied with each other in deceiving the world, by trying to look as if they cared nothing about it; and where men sneered at women, and boasted of being too knowing to be caught even with a gilded hook. _My_ world, I told you, should be where self was not upon the surface, as in yours; where Nature reigned supreme, and where earth was peopled with men and women in whom thought was brought into action by necessity. "And the opening chapter of my career in Southern Africa! how you laughed at that, though in all good humour, because you were prosperous at the time. Ah, what a brilliant colouring does the rainbow of hope cast on all it falls upon!