I have received your letter at last, my ever dearest Miss Mitford, not the missing letter, but the one which comes to make up for it and to catch up my thoughts, which were grumbling at high tide, I do assure you.... As you observed last year (not without reason), these are the days of marrying and giving in marriage. Mr. Horne, you see[163] ... With all my heart I hope he may be very happy. Men risk a good deal in marriage, though not as much as women do; and on the other hand, the singleness of a man when his youth is over is a sadder thing than the saddest which an unmarried woman can suffer. Nearly all my friends of both sexes have been draining off into marriage these two years, scarcely one will be left in the sieve, and I may end by saying that I have happiness enough for my own share to be divided among them all and leave everyone, contented. For me, I take it for pure magic, this life of mine. Surely nobody was ever so happy before. I shall wake some morning with my hair all dripping out of the enchanted bucket, or if not we shall both claim the 'Flitch' next September, if you can find one for us in the land of Cockaigne, drying in expectancy of the revolution in Tennyson's 'Commonwealth.' Well, I don't agree with Mr. Harness in admiring the lady of 'Locksley Hall.' I _must_ either pity or despise a woman who could have married Tennyson and chose a common man. If happy in her choice, I despise her. That's matter of opinion, of course. You may call it matter of foolishness when I add that I personally would rather be teased a little and smoked over a good deal by a man whom I could look up to and be proud of, than have my feet kissed all day by a Mr. Smith in boots and a waistcoat, and thereby chiefly distinguished. Neither I nor another, perhaps, had quite a right to expect a combination of qualities, such as meet, though, in my husband, who is as faultless and pure in his private life as any Mr. Smith of them all, who would not owe five shillings, who lives like a woman in abstemiousness on a pennyworth of wine a day, never touches a cigar even.... Do you hear, as we do, from Mr. Forster, that his[164] new poem is his best work? As soon as you read it, let me have your opinion. The subject seems almost identical with one of Chaucer's. Is it not so? We have spent here the most delightful of summers, notwithstanding the heat, and I begin to comprehend the possibility of St. Lawrence's ecstasies on the gridiron. Very hot it certainly has been and is, yet there have been cool intermissions; and as we have spacious and airy rooms, and as Robert lets me sit all day in my white dressing gown without a single masculine criticism, and as we can step out of the window on a sort of balcony terrace which is quite private and swims over with moonlight in the evenings, and as we live upon water melons and iced water and figs and all manner of fruit, we bear the heat with an angelic patience and felicity which really are edifying.