Swift answered, that in order to satisfy Mrs. Johnson's scruples, and relieve her mind, he was ready to go through the mere ceremony of marriage with her, on two conditions;--first, that they should live separately exactly as they did before;--secondly, that it should be kept a profound secret from all the world.[114] To these conditions, however hard and humiliating, she was obliged to submit: and the ceremony was performed privately by Dr. Ashe, in 1716. This nominal marriage spared her at least some of the torments of jealousy, by rendering a union with her rival impossible. Yet, within a year afterwards, we find this ill-fated rival, the yet more unhappy Vanessa,--more unhappy because endued by nature with quicker passions, and far less fortitude and patience,--following Swift to Ireland. She had a plausible pretext for this journey, being heiress to a considerable property at Celbridge, about twelve miles from Dublin, on which she came to reside with her sister;[115] but her real inducement was her unconquerable love for him. Nothing could be more _mal apropos_ to Swift than her arrival in Dublin: placed between two women, thus devoted to him, his perplexity was not greater than his heartless duplicity deserved: nothing could extricate him but the simple, but desperate expedient of disclosing the truth, and this he could not or would not do: regardless of the sacred ties which now bound him to Stella, he continued to correspond with Vanessa and to visit her; but "the whole course of this correspondence precludes the idea of a guilty intimacy."[116] _She_, whose passion was as pure as it was violent and exclusive, asked but to be his wife. She would have flung down her fortune and herself at his feet, and bathed them with tears of gratitude, if he would have deigned to lift her to his arms. In the midst of all the mortification, anguish, and heart-wearing suspense to which his stern temper and inexplicable conduct exposed her, still she clung to the hopes he had awakened, and which, either in cowardice, or compassion, or selfish egotism, he still kept alive. He concludes one of his letters with the following sentence in French, "mais soyez assuree, que jamais personne au monde n'a ete aimee, honoree, estimee, adoree, par votre amie, que vous:"[117] and there are other passages to the same effect, little agreeing with his professions to poor Stella:--one or the other, or both, must have been grossly deceived.