_Dear Edward,--I think we were wise to part. We were too unsuited to one another, and our difficulties could only have increased. The knot of marriage between two persons of differing temperaments is so intricate that it can only be cut: you may try to unravel it, and think you are succeeding, but another turn shows you that the tangle is only worse than ever. Even time is powerless. Some things are impossible; you cannot heap water up like stones, you cannot measure one man by another man’s rule. I am certain we were wise to separate. I see that if we had continued to live together our quarrels would have perpetually increased. It is horrible to look back upon those vulgar brawls--we wrangled like fishwives. I cannot understand how my mouth could have uttered such things._ _It is very bitter to look back and compare my anticipations with what has really happened. Did I expect too much from life? Ah me, I only expected that my husband would love me. It is because I asked so little that I have received nothing. In this world you must ask much, you must spread your praises abroad, you must trample under-foot those who stand in your path, you must take up all the room you can or you will be elbowed away; you must be irredeemably selfish, or you will be a thing of no account, a frippery that man plays with and flings aside._ _Of course I expected the impossible, I was not satisfied with the conventional unity of marriage; I wanted to be really one with you. Oneself is the whole world, and all other people are merely strangers. At first in my vehement desire, I used to despair because I knew you so little; I was heartbroken at the impossibility of really understanding you, of getting right down into your heart of hearts. Never, to the best of my knowledge, have I seen your veritable self; you are nearly as much a stranger to me as if I had known you but an hour. I bared my soul to you, concealing nothing--there is in you a man I do not know and have never seen. We are so absolutely different, I don’t know a single thing that we have in common; often when we have been talking and fallen into silence, our thoughts, starting from the same standpoint, have travelled in contrary directions, and on speaking again, we found how widely they had diverged. I hoped to know you to the bottom of your soul. Oh, I hoped that we should be united, so as to have but one soul between us; and yet on the most commonplace occasion, I can never know your thoughts. Perhaps it might have been different if we had had children; they might have formed between us a truer link, and perhaps in the delight of them I should have forgotten my impracticable dreams. But fate was against us, I come from a rotten stock. It is written in the book that the Leys should depart from the sight of men, and return to their mother the earth, to be incorporated with her; and who knows in the future what may be our lot! I like to think that in the course of