English fiction -- 19th century; Marriage -- Fiction
'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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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