I pardon you for having the romantic fancies of seventeen, provided you correct them with the good sense of four and twenty.
Adieu! I have engaged myself to Colonel H——, on the presumption that you are too polite to refuse to dance with Fitzgerald, and too prudent to refuse to dance at all.
Your affectionate
A. Fermor.
LETTER CXX.122.
To Miss Fermor, at Silleri.
Quebec, Saturday morning.
How unjust have I been in my hatred of Madame Des Roches! she spent yesterday with us, and after dinner desired to converse with me an hour in my apartment, where she opened to me all her heart on the subject of her love for Rivers.
She is the noblest and most amiable of women, and I have been in regard to her the most capricious and unjust: my hatred of her was unworthy my character; I blush to own the meanness of my sentiments, whilst I admire the generosity of hers.
Why, my dear, should I have hated her? she was unhappy, and deserved rather my compassion: I had deprived her of all hope of being beloved, it was too much to wish to deprive her also of his conversation. I knew myself the only object of Rivers’s love; why then should I have envied her his friendship? she had the strongest reason to hate me, but I should have loved and pitied her.
Can there be a misfortune equal to that of loving Rivers without hope of a return? Yet she has not only born this misfortune without complaint, but has been the confidante of his passion for another; he owned to her all his tenderness for me, and drew a picture of me, “which,which, she told me, ought, had she listened to reason, to have destroyed even the shadow of hope: but that love, ever ready to flatter and deceive, had betrayed her into the weakness of supposing it possible I might refuse him, and that gratitude might, in that case, touch his heart with tenderness for one who loved him with the most pure and disinterested affection; that her journey to Quebec had removed the veil love had placed between her and truth; that she was now convinced the faint hope she had encouraged was madness, and that our souls were formed for each other.