“My Kitty the kind and true, your questions I will answer as best I may, and the rather that I have no subject more ready and agreeable to my pen than our new Duchess. ’Tis impossible I should describe her Grace’s person for this I have done before, but I will say she hath put on a thousand new charms since her happy marriage in France, together with such splendours as can’t be described, and in sober truth is a radiant beauty with none to peer her but my other kind Kitty. Yet such beauties do not compete unkindly—they shine like twin stars, each lighting the other.
“Kitty, you preach often on the superlative advantage of birth, then tell me how comes it that this girl from Lord knows where, for I never judged well to enquire too curiously, moves with a tranquil grace that nothing can ruffle or confuse. You say ‘Bolton’s a man high-bred beyond the common. ’Tis from him she catches it.’ I grant you his breeding, but can say that from the first time I saw her at Queensbury House, I saw her simple and joyous and sweet-natured and judged her simplicity the highest breeding, for it can never fail being very nature’s self. You should have seen her at a rout t’other night aglitter with the Bolton diamonds, and you know them fine,—yet still with a half-Quakerish air of quaint innocence under their weight of splendour that takes all the men by storm and makes all the women appear brazen. Excepting of course your humble servant whose air of innocence is art’s perfection and in much request.
“But you ask—‘Is she received? Is the past condoned?’ ‘Do my Lady Grimalkin and Madam Prude condescend to know her Grace?’ No, Kitty, they don’t, and were I she, loud would be my thanksgivings on that head. But all the young and lovely and kind and generous flock to her and make a charming society indeed. As for Bolton, he’s transfigured. I never saw a man so youthened (forgive this new-coined word).— He will never cease to be a lover even when the days come of gout and penitence and regret for the pleasant sins one might have committed and did not. The pair shed goodness and charity and happy thoughts about them as natural as flowers.
“Is it then all a blaze of pure unmitigated joy, my Kitty asks dubious? Ah no! In looking at their little golden-curled cherub I guess their pang and my heart beats responsive. And other women less kind, less virtuous than she, have it in their power to send a shaft deep in her tender heart from which wound the blood wells to her cheek and dyes it crimson. What then? Shall presumptuous mortals hope for the happiness of angels? It cannot be, and, such as her lot is, few but must envy it.
“You ask also of my own future, my kind Kitty. Enigmatic, my dear, enigmatic to myself. I see Bas often and speak with him lightly and pass on with never a regret. He can hurt me no more. ’Tis all as dead and gone as the Pyramids. Did I ever love him? I can’t tell. ’Twas in a former life if so. Did he ever love me? He never loved or will love any but his charming self, though I hear of attentions to the rich and handsome Mrs. Janssen that may end in wedding favours. Let them! I will dance at his wedding with the lightest pair of heels there, and thank Heaven for my deliverance.
“I writ you some time since—’tis good to be a widow. So good that I purpose to remain a widow indeed. You can’t dispute my wisdom since the Apostle himself commends the State and recommends it in preference to marriage, his Sanctity forgetting, as I think, that one must endure the tribulation of the one to attain the tranquillity of the other. Well, I have endured and attained and there I leave it. If for a moment I wavered I love my widowhood the better now. Says the Prince to me the other day—‘When shall we have your wedding favours?’ Says I—‘When I learn to love trouble better than ease and prefer discomfort to comfort. And that won’t be till I lose my senses in dotage, Sir.’ There’s many a true word spoken in jest.
“Well, farewell, my kind Kitty,—but throw not a dart at my dear new Duchess. I name her the chaste Diana, and hold her so in word, thought, and deed. I fling down my glove as a challenge to man or woman who dares dispute it. And if even your dear self picks up the glove, I will fight to the death.
“And now the lights burn low and I am for sleep. I make you my curtsey. Good-night, Good-night!”
THE END