A letter from Emily, which I must answer: she is extremely absurd, which your tender lovers always are.
Adieu! yours,
A. Fermor.
Sir George Clayton had left Montreal some days before your brother arrived there; I was pleased to hear it, because, with all your bother’sbrother’s good sense, and concern for Emily’s honor, and Sir George’s natural coldness of temper, a quarrel between them would have been rather difficult to have been avoided.
LETTER CXVIII.120.
To Miss Fermor.
Quebec, Thursday morning.
Do you think, my dear, that Madame Des Roches has heard from Rivers? I wish you would ask her this afternoon at the governor’s: I am anxious to know, but ashamed to enquire.
Not, my dear, that I have the weakness to be jealous; but I shall think his letter to me a higher compliment, if I know he writes to nobody else. I extremely approve his friendship for Madame Des Roches; she is very amiable, and certainly deserves it: but you know, Bell, it would be cruel to encourage an affection, which she must conquer, or be unhappy: if she did not love him, there would be nothing wrong in his writing to her; but, as she does, it would be doing her the greatest injury possible: ’tis as much on her account as my own I am thus anxious.
Did you ever read so tender, yet so lively a letter as Rivers’s to me? he is alike in all: there is in his letters, as in his conversation,
“All that can softly win, or gaily charm
The heart of woman.”