“What do you think Charlotte is now bent on? She wants to be a trained nurse. I have felt for a long time that she had something revolutionary in her mind. It doesn’t matter to me particularly, but Cornelius is grieved to the heart. However, we have no right to coerce her, and financial independence seems to be the one thing on which her mind is fixed.”
Three years later she wrote again:
“Charlotte has finished her training and is going to the Philippines. She came in from New York last week to break the news. I said little, and Cornelius said less. But we have talked it over, and have decided that she must judge for herself. I don’t feel satisfied with the results of our care for Charlotte, and I don’t know where the blame lies, but I do feel that she cherishes some bitterness of feeling in her heart, and that she is very unhappy.
“Something in her nature wears clearer as she grows older, some ingrained romanticism which we did not suspect, and which repels me. However, it is too late to worry about now. She has taken her life into her own hands, and has decreed that it shall lie apart from ours; and I, for one, am thankful.”
To these may be added a final word from Miss Ponsonby herself, written, on her wedding eve after her return from the Luneta.
”My dear Aunt:
“This is the last letter I shall write you for some time, for to-morrow I am going to be married, and shall leave Manila for a remote island where the opportunity for correspondence is small.
“The man I am going to marry, whose name is Martin Collingwood, is engaged in pearl-fishing in the seas south of Manila. He is a man, I believe, with the money-making gift. However that is not the reason that I am marrying him. With me it is absolutely a matter of the heart. I am marrying him because, as nearly as I can see, he is the one human being who has ever loved me in this world, and because I cannot live life without love.
“It is hardly necessary to say that I am sacrificing my ambitions in this matter. To a woman brought up as I have been, a dependent, a brilliant marriage would represent the most successful thing, the most nearly compensating thing, that life could offer. It has not come to me, however, and I am making the best I can of what has offered.