Your little namesake promises to be the greatest beauty in the county. Dolly, who is a pretty little cherry-cheek, and her father’s great favourite, prates like a parrot. How delightful will be the task of expanding and forming the minds of these two cherubs! how joyfully and how thankfully do I look back on the troubled sea which I have passed! My voyage indeed was not long, but my sufferings were great while they lasted. I never, since I was married, enjoyed life till now. You know my match was originally the result of duty to the best of mothers; and though, if I ever knew my own heart, it was absolutely freed from all attachment to any other person, yet was it not so devoted to Mr Arnold, as to have made him my choice preferably to all other men, if I had not resolved in this, as in every other action of my life, to be determined by those to whom I owed obedience. When I married Mr Arnold, I esteemed him; a sufficient foundation, in the person of a husband, whereon to build love. That love, his kindness, and my own gratitude, in a little produced in my heart; and I will venture to say few wives loved so well, none better. You know I could never bear to consider love as a childish divinity, who exercises his power by throwing the heart into tumultuous raptures: my love, tho’ of a more temperate kind, was sufficiently fervent to make Mr Arnold’s coldness towards me alone capable of wounding my heart most sensibly; but when this coldness was aggravated by the cruel distrust which he was taught to entertain of me, the blow indeed became scarce supportable; and I did not till then know the progress he had made in my affections.
Sorrows, my Cecilia, soften and subdue the mind prodigiously; and I think my heart was better prepared from its sufferings to receive Mr Arnold’s returning tenderness, than an age of courtship in the gay and prosperous days of life could have framed it to. I exult in his restored affections, and love him a thousand times better than ever I did. He deserves it; I am sure he does: he was led away from me by enchantment; nothing else could have done it. But the charm is broke, thank heaven! and I find him now the tenderest, the best of men. Every look, every word, every action of his life, is expressive of a love next to adoration. Oh! I should be too happy, if the blessings I now possess were to be my continued portion in this life! There is, however, but one about which I can rationally indulge any fears—My mother—Her years, and her growing infirmities, will not suffer me to hope for her being long absent from her final place of felicity. You always used to say I anticipated misfortunes: this event may be farther off than my anxious fears sometimes suggest to me; so no more of it.
March 10
My good Lady V—— writes me word, that all our business is finished. The whole amount of our effects came but to three thousand four hundred pounds; our debts (including some charges which have occurred in the transacting of our affairs) exceeded eight thousand. Our worthy Lord V—— has paid the whole, and has made himself our only creditor. We have nothing now, that we can call our own, but my jointure. I do not reckon upon my mother’s bounty to us; our income from her, and the house we live in, will be Sir George’s, whenever it is our misfortune to lose her. But she tells me she is well, and talks of coming down in about a fortnight.
March 11
I am here in a scene of still life, my dear; and you must now expect to hear of nothing but such trivial matters as used to be the subject of our journals when we were both girls, and you lived within a bow-shot of Sidney-Castle, and saw me every day. The last three months of my life have glided away like a smooth stream, when there is not a breath of wind to ruffle it; and after you read the transactions of one day, you know how I pass all the rest.
I have told you of every-body that came to see me, and all the visits that I returned: I have given you an account of all our old acquaintance, and of some new ones. You know what my amusements are, and what my business. Indeed, what I call business, is my chief pleasure. You, who are surrounded by the gaieties of a splendid court, had need of the partiality which I know you have for your Sidney, to desire a continuation of her insipid narrative. But, I suppose, if I were to tell you, that, on such a day, my white Guiney-hen brought out a fine brood of chickens, you might be as well pleased with it, as I should be to hear from you of the birth of an arch-duchess. Indeed, my Cecilia, there is such a sameness in my now-tranquil days, that I believe I must have recourse to telling you my dreams, to furnish out matter of variety.
March 19
We have had a wedding to-day in our neighbourhood. Young Main (Patty’s brother) has got a very pretty young gentlewoman, with a fortune of five thousand pounds. It seems, this pair had been fond of each other from their childhood; but the girl’s fortune put her above her lover’s hopes; however, as he has, for a good while, been in very great business, and has the reputation of being better skilled in his profession than any one in the country, he was in hopes, that his character, his mistress’s affection for him, and his own constancy, would have some little weight with her family. Accordingly he ventured to make his application to the young woman’s brother, at whose disposal she was, her father having been dead for some years; but he was rejected with scorn, and forbid the house.
The girl’s father, it seems, had been an humourist, and left her the fortune under a severe restriction; for, if ever she married without her brother’s consent, she was to lose it; so that, in that particular instance of disposing of her person, she was never to be her own mistress. In the disposal of her fortune, however, he did not so tie her up; for after the age of one-and-twenty, she had the power of bequeathing her fortune by will to whom she pleased.