Florence.
My dearest Miss Cox,—It would be worse than ingratitude in me were I to defer telling you how happy I am, and with what a perfect shower of favors Fortune has just overwhelmed me! Little thought I, a few weeks back, that Florence was to become to me the spot nearest and dearest to my heart, associated as it is, and ever must be, with the most blissful event of my life! Sir Penrhyn Morris, who, from some unexplained misconception, had all but ceased to know us, was accidentally thrown in our way by the circumstance of mamma's imprisonment. By his kind and zealous aid her liberation was at length accomplished, and, as a matter of course, he called to make his inquiries after her, and receive our grateful acknowledgments.
I scarcely can tell—my head is too confused to remember—the steps by which he retraced his former place in our intimacy. It is possible there may have been explanations on both sides. I only know that he took his leave one morning with the very coldest of salutations, and appeared on the next day with a manner of the deepest devotion, so evidently directed towards myself that it would have been downright affectation to appear indifferent to it.
He asked me in a low and faltering voice if I would accord him a few moments' interview. He spoke the words with a degree of effort at calmness that gave them a most significant meaning, and I suddenly remembered a certain passage in one of your letters to me, wherein you speak of the inconsiderate conduct which girls occasionally pursue in accepting the attentions of men whose difference in age would seem to exclude them from the category of suitors. So far from having incurred this error, I had actually retreated from any advances on his part, not from the disparity of our ages, but from the far wider gulfs that separated his highly cultivated and informed mind from my ungifted and unstored intellect. Partly in shame at my inferiority, partly with a conscious sense of what his impression of me must be, I avoided, so far as I could, his intimacy; and even when domesticated with him, I sought for occupations in which he could not join, and estranged myself from the pursuits which he loved to practise.
Oh, my dear, kind governess, how thoroughly I recognize the truthfulness of all your views of life; how sincerely I own that I have never followed them without advantage, never neglected them without loss! How often have you told me that "dissimulation is never good;" that, however speciously we may persuade ourselves that in feigning a part we are screening our self-esteem from insult, or saving the feelings of others, the policy is ever a bad one; and that, "if our sincerity be only allied with an honest humility, it never errs." The pains I took to escape from the dangerous proximity of his presence suggested to him that I disliked his attentions, and desired to avoid them; and acting on this conviction it was that he made a journey to England during the time I was a visitor at his mother's. It would appear, however, that his esteem for me had taken a deeper root than he perhaps suspected, for on his return his attentions were redoubled, and I could detect that in a variety of ways his feelings towards me were not those of mere friendship. Of mine towards him I will conceal nothing from you. They were deep and intense admiration for qualities of the highest order, and as much of love as consisted with a kind of fear,—a sense of almost terror lest he should resent the presumption of such affection as mine.
You already know something of our habits of life abroad,—wasteful and extravagant beyond all the pretensions of our fortune. It was a difficult thing for me to carry on the semblance of our assumed position so as not to throw discredit upon my family, and at the same time avoid the dis-ingenuousness of such a part. The struggle, from which I saw no escape, was too much for me, and I determined to leave the Morrises and return home,—to leave a house wherein I already had acquired the first steps of the right road in life, and go back to dissipations in which I felt no pleasure, and gayeties that never enlivened! I did not tell you all this at the time, my dear friend, partly because I had not the courage for it, and partly that the avowal might seem to throw a reproach on those whom my affection should shield from even a criticism. If I speak of it now, it is because, happily, the theme is one hourly discussed amongst us in all the candor of true frankness. We have no longer concealments, and we are happy.
It may have been that the abruptness of my departure offended Captain Morris, or, possibly, some other cause produced the estrangement; but, assuredly, he no longer cultivated the intimacy he had once seemed so ardently to desire, and, until the event of mamma's misfortune here, he ceased to visit us.
And now came the interview I have alluded to! Oh, my dearest friend, if there be a moment in life which combines within it the most exquisite delight with the most torturing agony, it is that in which an affection is sought for by one who, immeasurably above us in all the gifts of fortune, still seems to feel that there is a presumption in his demand, and that his appeal may be rejected. I know not how to speak of that conflict between pride and shame, between the ecstasy of conquest and the innate sense of the unworthiness that had won the victory!
Sir Penrhyn thought, or fancied he thought, me fond of display and splendor,—that in conforming to the quiet habits of his mother's house, I was only submitting with a good grace to privations. I undeceived him at once. I confessed, not without some shame, that I was in a manner unsuited to the details of an exalted station,—that wealth and its accompaniments would, in reality, be rather burdens than pleasure to one whose tastes were humble as my own,—that, in fact, I was so little of a "Grande Dame" that I should inevitably break down in the part, and that no appliances of mere riches could repay for the onerous duties of dispensing them.
"In so much," interrupted he, with a half-smile, "that you would prefer a poor man to a rich one?"