Nobody knows--nobody ever will know--and nobody had better ask--how I suffered (intermittently) whilst I waited for the letter I never got. “She doesn’t care for me!” I would cry. “She is in love with Curling. She has forgotten my very name. Or worse, she remembers me only to divert that rascally cashier, whom she meets, God knows how and where, with demure travesties of my pretty whispers.” And then--my imagination being always briskest when I was saddest, resembling a cat, that is friskiest at night--up would spring a vision: Conny with her sweet, deep eyes, her shining tresses, her adorable little figure, made love to by Curling, of the frizzy hair and pigeon-pie-shaped bosom; watching him (faugh!) with the divinest meaning in those eyes, into whose depths I had so often gazed, and gazed, and gazed, and still found nothing but a vacuum of moist and lambent blue! Then, Eugenio, would I clench my hands, and grind my teeth; then would I consign Mr. Curling’s soul to Mephistopheles, and hold an Imaginary Conversation with the faithless one, superior in wit, nature, satire, and the received beauties, to anything ever written by Savage Landor; in which I would now wither her with sarcasms, and now revive her with splendid entreaties, now overwhelm her with contempt, and now restore her with the most luxuriant tenderness. Did you never indulge in these mental strifes? Then you have never been in love. Who that has been in love has not morally wrestled with his goddess, as fanatically as ever Luther wrestled with the Devil? Don’t say _you trusted her_. Don’t outrage experience by pretending that you always had the most unbounded confidence in her. You know you hadn’t. You know when you left her for a week, that you thought, that day, of the party she was going; to next evening, of the men she would meet there, of the waltzes she would dance there, of the conservatory she would retire to. Again, when you were miles away, don’t you remember thinking: “To-day is Lady Sloper’s picnic; Aurelia is going; she will meet that beast Lovall; she will come home by moonlight in a crowded vehicle, the beast Lovall at her side, while her mamma, her only protector, slumbers a mile behind in the slow omnibus.” Pshaw! he that writes this has gone through it all, and what consolation, fellow-sufferers, has he to offer you? Dean Swift said of the weather, “I never remember any weather not too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry; but, however God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very well.” So of love; at the end of the year ’tis all very well. END OF VOL. II. CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.