But besides this, my Emily, I would not be troubled with your connections (excepting your mother) and with Sir H.’s friends for the universe. My advice is then to take a steady resolution.
I shall then be free to dry up the tears of my lovely Emily and give her comfort. If you do not forfeit my esteem perhaps my Emily may be happy. You know I have been so by avoiding the vexation which frequently arises from ingratitude and caprice.
Nothing but your letter and your distress could incline me to alter my system, but remember I never will give up my peace or continue my connection one moment after my confidence is betrayed. If you should come to town and take my advice you should take another name. By degrees I would get you a new set of acquaintances, and by keeping your own secret I may expect to see you respected and admired. Thus far as relates to yourself. As to the child, its mother shall obtain its kindness from me and it shall never want. I enclose you some money: do not throw it away. God bless you, my dearest lovely girl, take your determination and let me hear from you once more. Adieu, my dear Emily.”
He read this epistle through twice (with certain passages omitted here), then folded and sealed it with his usual impeccable care. He knew it must shine like a rainbow in blackest clouds through the rain-wet eyes that would read it.
“I have three safeguards,” he reflected, as he impressed it with his seal of a flying Eros in cornelian, “money—she has none, nor prospects. The child, for who else will spend a doit on it? And gratitude—unless the old lady, her mother, urges her on to make a better market of such beauty.”
It will be observed that Greville put gratitude last. He prided himself on his knowledge of the human and especially the feminine heart. So he finally despatched his letter.
Next day he wrote to his dear Hamilton, between whom and himself ran a pleasant link of exchanged piccadilloes as well as of articles of virtu. He was wont to dissect the immoral in his reflections to Hamilton as well as in his own heart, and he did it now, dwelling slightly on the arrangement he contemplated and fully on his reasons for making it. He did not spare his Emily’s past. An immaculate one would have appeared as absurd in Sir William’s eyes as his own in such circumstances, and there was no thought of concealment. But it afforded an opening for the reflections on women which he privately judged worthy to be classed with the epigrams of the mighty, and, indeed, they were pretty well for a man of thirty odd. Thus he wrote of the weaker vessel.
“With women I observe they have only resource in art, and there is to them no interval between plain ground and the precipice, and the springs of action are so much in the extreme of the sublime and the low that no absolute dependence can be given by men—” and so forth—Rochefoucauld and water, but very impressive to Sir William Hamilton, who, though the elder, was deeply influenced by his handsome nephew’s worldly skill and finesse. Greville, at all events, did justice to Emily’s beauty, or as he now insisted on calling her, “Emma’s,” that name being in vogue as a romantic variant, and as such gladly adopted in the change he suggested.
“Emma,” he wrote, “is the most amazing beauty that ever my eyes lit on. I long, my dear Hamilton, for your opinion to support mine that on the whole she is quite unequalled in either of our memories. Contemplating her from the point of view of a student of the perfect standard of the antique I know no alteration I could have recommended either in face or figure unless it were possibly a little more delicacy of the hands and feet. Her masses of hair spring from a brow as low and broad as the Clytie’s, the length and roundness of her throat suggest our Roman Venus, the moulding of back and bosom the Stooping Venus, and—”
But why continue? All that he and Sir William had ever passed in delighted review in Italy was summoned to draw the fairest picture in the elder man’s mind that words could frame or memory paint. “And even this falls short of the reality,” ended the letter. “Could you imagine a man being such a ruffianly fool as to fling away such a jewel—the perfectest modern-antique that ever human eye beheld? I hope to make her a really economic housekeeper, for you know my needs are urgent and the house in Portman Square a terrible drain on my resources. I shall now proceed to let it.”