It is scarcely needful to say to you, my dear, that in the above there is not the slightest personal disrespect intended to Mr. Pelham or any other individual being.
True men are not such. A woman’s instincts repel such forms of men. You may dress the real as meanly as an American slave, or you may elaborate the attire of the counterfeit to the antipodes of this—to pontifical robes—and the living soul of a woman will never fail to distinguish the false from the true.
Why you yourself, E * * *, would have wept your eyes out, I am sure, if I could have deliberately linked myself to the lifeless purpose in which the vitality of such beings ends.
He is not one of these. He is a man, E * * *, whom I love. Do you wonder I love him? It is because he is a man—a man, and not a hollow make-believe.
It is so with every true woman. In her love she recognizes no distinction of position. The gods of her idolatry, like the statues of the Greeks—whether standing in a rough warehouse or in the Louvre—remain unchanged in the calmness of their beauty and power. We ask nothing more of them but themselves, to gaze upon them, to become intoxicated, and to die with the love of them. Such seems to me the man to whom, by the profoundest law of my nature, I yield my being.
But will the world understand this? Perhaps it is the accident of my place and estate, that, surrounding me with what passes by the name of power, made me see its emptiness—that, uniting me to the highest representative of a religion in the person of a son who put it lightly off, made its meaningless character apparent—that, teaching me to strengthen a family distinction by the unconscious sacrifice of myself to him in whose control I had been somehow left, taught me to question if it were right, and at last to rise above and throw off the chains of an unnatural compliance.
My intercourse and secret correspondence with you from my early girlhood taught you how wayward, how passionate I was; and those letters are so much a part of me that I cannot write anything again as they were written.
You have preserved them; read them again, even to the days that followed my unnatural blood-kin union and its results.
Blood-kin union it was. Intermarriage always.
There was the marriage of my husband’s uncle John with my aunt Elizabeth, first cousins.