Shenstone says admirably, “That reconciliation is the tenderest part of love and friendship: the soul here discovers a kind of elasticity, and, being forced back, returns with an additional violence.”
Who would not quarrel for the pleasure of reconciliation! I shall be very angry with Fitzgerald if he goes on in this mild way.
Tell your sister, she cannot be more mortified than I am, that it is impossible for me to be at her masquerade.
Adieu! Your affectionate
A. Fitzgerald.
Don’t you think, my dear Rivers, that marriage, on prudent principles, is a horrid sort of an affair? It is really cruel of papas and mammas to shut up two poor innocent creatures in a house together, to plague and torment one another, who might have been very happy separate.
Where people take their own time, and chuse for themselves, it is another affair, and I begin to think it possible affection may last through life.
I sometimes fancy to myself Fitzgerald and I loving on, from the impassioned hour when I first honored him with my hand, to that tranquil one, when we shall take our afternoon’s nap vis a vis in two arm chairs, by the fire-side, he a grave country justice, and I his worship’s good sort of a wife, the Lady Bountiful of the parish.
I have a notion there is nothing so very shocking in being an oldish gentlewoman; what one loses in charms, is made up in the happy liberty of doing and saying whatever one pleases. Adieu!
LETTER CCXIII.217.
To Captain Fitzgerald.