English fiction -- 19th century; Marriage -- Fiction
She has not said a syllable in depreciation of you. That is
to her credit. She also admits that I must yield freely if at all, and
she grants me the use of similes; but her tactics are to contest them one
by one, and the admirable pretender is not as shifty as the mariner's
breeze, he is not like the wandering spark in burnt paper, of which you
cannot say whether it is chasing or chased: it is I who am the shifty
Pole to the steadiest of magnets. She is a princess in other things
besides her superiority to Physics. There will be wild scenes at Baden.
'My Diary of to-day is all bestowed on you. What have I to write in it
except the pair of commas under the last line of yesterday--" He has not
come!" Oh! to be caring for a he.
'O that I were with your sister now, on one side of her idol, to correct
her extravagant idolatry! I long for her. I had a number of nice little
phrases to pet her with.
'You have said (I have it written) that men who are liked by men are the
best friends for women. In which case, the earl should be worthy of our
friendship; he is liked. Captain Abrane and Sir Meeson, in spite of the
hard service he imposes on them with such comical haughtiness, incline to
speak well of him, and Methuen Rivers--here for two days on his way to
his embassy at Vienna--assured us he is the rarest of gentlemen on the
point of honour of his word. They have stories of him, to confirm
Livia's eulogies, showing him punctilious to chivalry: No man alive is
like him in that, they say. He grieves me. All that you have to fear
is my pity for one so sensitive. So speed, sir! It is not good for us
to be much alone, and I am alone when you are absent.
'I hear military music!
'How grand that music makes the dullest world appear in a minute. There
is a magic in it to bring you to me from the most dreadful of distances.
--Chillon! it would kill me!--Writing here and you perhaps behind the
hill, I can hardly bear it;--I am torn away, my hand will not any more.
This music burst out to mock me! Adieu.
'I am yours.
'Your HENRIETTA.
'A kiss to the sister. It is owing to her.'
Carinthia kissed the letter on that last line. It seemed to her to end
in a celestial shower.
She was oppressed by wonder of the writer who could run like the rill of
the mountains in written speech; and her recollection of the contents
perpetually hurried to the close, which was more in her way of writing,
for there the brief sentences had a throb beneath them.
She did not speak of the letter to her brother when she returned it. A
night in the carriage, against his shoulder, was her happy prospect, in
the thought that she would be with her dearest all night, touching him
asleep, and in the sweet sense of being near to the beloved of the
fairest angel of her sex. They pursued their journey soon after Anton
was dismissed with warm shakes of the hand and appointments for a
possible year in the future.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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