‘I have written my husband--as Janey ceases to call her own; and it was pretty and touching to hear her “my husband.”--Oh! a dull letter. But he is my husband though he keeps absent--to be longed for--he is my husband still, my husband always. Chillon is Henrietta’s husband, the world cries out, and when she is flattered she does the like, for then it is not too presumptuous that she should name Henrietta Chillon’s wife. In my ears, husband has the sweeter sound. It brings an angel from overhead. Will it bring him one-half hour sooner? My love! My dear! If it did, I should be lisping “husband, husband, husband” from cock-crow to owl’s cry. Livia thinks the word foolish, if not detestable. She and I have our different opinions. She is for luxury. I choose poverty and my husband. Poverty has its beauty, if my husband is the sun of it. Elle radote. She would not have written so dull a letter to her husband if she had been at the opera last night, or listened to a distant street-band. No more--the next line would be bleeding. He should have her blood too, if that were her husband’s--it would never be; but if it were for his good in the smallest way. Chillon’s wish is to give his blood for them he loves. Never did woman try more to write worthily to her absent lord and fall so miserably into the state of dripping babe from bath on nurse’s knee. Cover me, my lord; and love, my cause for--no, my excuse, my refuge from myself. We are one? Oh! we are one!--and we have been separated eight and twenty days. ‘HENRIETTA KIRBY-LEVELLIER.’ That was a letter for the husband and lover to receive in a foreign land and be warmed. The tidings of Carinthia washed him clean of the grimy district where his waxen sister had developed her stubborn insensibility;--resembling craziness, every perversion of the refinement demanded by young Englishmen of their ladies; and it pacified him with the belief that she was now at rest, the disturbed history of their father and mother at rest as well; his conscience in relation to the marriage likewise at rest. Chillon had a wife. Her writing of the welcome to poverty stirred his knowledge of his wife’s nature. Carinthia might bear it and harden to flint; Henrietta was a butterfly for the golden rays. His thoughts, all his energies, were bent on the making of money to supply her need for the pleasure she flew in--a butterfly’s grub without it. Accurately so did the husband and lover read his wife--adoring her the more.