Dearest Richard,—I like the woman thou gavest me very much and rejoice in her brogue, and I am very grateful to you, always. Tell me more about the state of things. I can bear it.—Yours,
V.
XXXVII
Verena Raby to Hazel Barrance
Dearest Hazel,—I have had a rather pathetic letter from poor Horace, who, after long wooing you in vain, comes to me (I hope this isn’t betraying his confidence: I don’t think it is really) as a new legal Miles Standish. Young men at the Bar are not usually so ready to seek other mouthpieces, are they? Not those, at any rate, next to whom I used to sit at dinner parties in the days when I was well and now and then came to London.
Of course, my dear child, I am not going to interfere. To be quite candid, I don’t want you to marry Horace. I think you would condemn yourself to a very stuffy kind of existence if you did, and I am against first-cousins marrying in any case. But his appeal gives me an opportunity of saying what I have more than once wished, and that is that you would revise your general attitude to marriage. Again and again in your letters to me I have detected a bitterness about it, the suggestion that because some couples have fallen out, all must sooner or later do so. This isn’t true. But even if it were, it ought not to deter us, for all of us must live our own lives, and make our own experiments, and all of us ought to believe that we are the great splendid triumphant exceptions! It is that belief—I might almost call it religion—which I miss in you and which seems to be now so generally lacking. Put on low grounds it might be called the gambling spirit, but it is a form of gambling in which there is no harm, but rather virtue. I often wish that I had had more of it, but I was unfortunate in having my affections so enchained by one who too little knew his mind, nor sufficiently valued his captive, that I was never free to consider offers.
Marriage may always be a lottery and often turn out disastrously, and even more often be a dreary curtailment of two persons’ liberty, but it is a natural proceeding and, unless one utterly denies any purpose in life, a necessary one; and I am all in favour of young people believing in it. I wish that you were braver and healthier about it, but I don’t want you to become Mrs. Horace Mun-Brown, and I am telling him so.
This is the longest letter I have written since I took to my bed; indeed I believe it is the longest I ever wrote.—Your loving
Aunt V.