England -- Fiction; Love stories; Male friendship -- Fiction; Quakers -- Fiction; Social classes -- Fiction
The letter which she wrote to her sister on the present occasion was
as follows;--
Trafford Park,
Saturday, October 25th.
MY DEAR GERALDINE,--
I take up my pen to write to you with a heart laden with
trouble. Things have become so bad with me that I do not
know where to turn myself unless you can give me comfort.
I am beginning to feel how terrible it is to have
undertaken the position of mother to another person's
children. God knows I have endeavoured to do my duty. But
it has all been in vain. Everything is over now. I have
divided myself for ever from Hampstead and from Fanny. I
have felt myself compelled to tell their father that I
have divorced them from my heart; and I have told Lord
Hampstead the same. You will understand how terrible must
have been the occasion when I found myself compelled to
take such a step as this.
You know how dreadfully shocked I was when she first
revealed to me the fact that she had promised to marry
that Post Office clerk. The young man had actually the
impudence to call on Lord Kingsbury in London, to offer
himself as a son-in-law. Kingsbury very properly would
not see him, but instructed Mr. Greenwood to do so. Mr.
Greenwood has behaved very well in the matter, and is a
great comfort to me. I hope we may be able to do something
for him some day. A viler or more ill-conditioned young
man he says that he never saw;--insolent, too, and talking
as though he had as much right to ask for Fanny's hand as
though he were one of the same class. As for that, she
would deserve nothing better than to be married to such a
man, were it not that all the world would know how closely
she is connected with my own darling boys!
Then we took her off to Königsgraaf; and such a time as
I had with her! She would write letters to this wretch,
and contrived to receive one. I did stop that, but you
cannot conceive what a life she led me. Of course I have
felt from the first that she would be divided from her
brothers, because one never knows how early bad morals may
be inculcated! Then her papa came, and Hampstead,--who in
all this has encouraged his sister. The young man is his
friend. After this who will say that any nobleman ought to
call himself what they call a Liberal? Then we came home;
and what do you think has happened? Hampstead has taken
his sister to live with him at Hendon, next door, as you
may say, to the Post Office clerk, where the young man
has made himself thoroughly at home;--and Kingsbury has
permitted it! Oh, Geraldine, that is the worst of it! Am I
not justified in declaring that I have divorced them from
my heart?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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