If you can keep in front of you always that basic principle which I explained in my first letter, it will guide you on all occasions, and, if you are disillusioned and disgusted with your husband, it will suggest the finest course for you to take. Try to be just, do not repine, admit to yourself that you have lost the first prize in the lottery of marriage, but that there is still the second to be obtained, namely, an unassailable position, your husband’s respect, perhaps the interest in possible children, the interest in your life and your place in the world. And, above all, that inward peace which comes from the knowledge that you at least on your side are keeping up the dignity of your name and station. You may say all this would be but a very second best, when love had been shipwrecked. I fully admit it, but it is more advisable to obtain the second best than the tenth--or to go under altogether. Accept the fact that such happiness as you had hoped for is not for you, and decide to be a noble woman and do your duty. Reflection will tell you that whatever you sow you will reap, so, if this misfortune should come to you, keep your head, Caroline, and use your common sense. Another thing to remember is that you will not always be young, and that many years of your life will probably be passed when the respect of the world, a great position, and the material advantages will count more than the romantic part of love. [Illustration: “_A great position will count more than the romantic part of love._”] And if, through your disillusion and disgust, and the pain of broken idols, you permit yourself to act foolishly and with want of dignity at a period when love seems of supreme importance, you will be laying up limitations for yourself. And it is only the fool who lays up limitations for himself or herself. You will not have got love back by acting so, and you will have lost what might have compensated you in the future. Nothing is more pitiful than the position of the woman of forty-five who has made scandals in her youth, quarreled with her husband and broken up her home, just because she herself was unhappy and the man was a brute. She is then left with none of the consolations of middle age. No one considers her; she is spoken of by her friends and relations as “poor So-and-so.” If she has had children, they have grown up under the wretched conditions of an atmosphere of partisanship for either parent. She is ever conscious of an anomalous position, and has to go through more humiliations than she would have had to do if she had borne bravely the anguishes of the time of trial, and used the whole of her intelligence to better the state of things. However much a man may turn into a brute, if he has once loved the woman she must in some way be to blame, because love is so strong a master that it can soften the greatest wretch, and if the woman had kept him loving her she would have kept her influence over him as well.