To Mrs. Clarence St. Claire
Concerning Her Husband
I am sorry that your matrimonial barque meets so many rough winds while hardly out of Honeymoon Bay.
Clarence and you seemed so deeply in love when I last saw you, six months after your wedding, that I had hoped all might go well with you.
I knew the disposition of Clarence to be tainted with jealousy, but hoped you would be able to eradicate it from his nature.
You know his poor mother suffered agonies from the infidelities of his father before Clarence was born. She had married a handsome foreigner with whom she was desperately enamoured, while he cared only for the fortune she brought him.
While still in the full light of the honeymoon he began to indulge in flirtations and amours, and poor Clarence, during the important prenatal period of life, received the mark of suspicion and the tendency to hypersensitiveness which then dominated the mother.
By the time Elise was born she had passed through the whole process, and was passive and indifferent.
I cannot help a sensation of amusement, even in face of the condition you describe (which is little short of tragic), as I recall the letter Clarence wrote begging me to try and prevent, by fair means or foul, his sister's marriage to old Mr. Volney.
That was two years before you and Clarence were married.