Adieu, my best beloved and kindest friend! Pray for your CLARISSA.
LETTER LVIII
MISS HOWE, TO MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE THURSDAY, APRIL 27.
I am sorry you sent back my Norris. But you must be allowed to do as you please. So must I, in my turn. We must neither of us, perhaps, expect absolutely of the other what is the rightest thing to be done: and yet few folks, so young as we are, better know what the rightest is. I cannot separate myself from you; although I give a double instance of my vanity in joining myself with you in this particular assertion.
I am most heartily rejoiced that your prospects are so much mended; and that, as I hoped, good has been produced out of evil. What must the man have been, what must have been his views, had he not taken such a turn, upon a letter so vile, and upon a treatment so unnatural, himself principally the occasion of it?
You know best your motives for suspending: but I wish you could have taken him at offers so earnest.* Why should you not have permitted him to send for Lord M.'s chaplain? If punctilio only was in the way, and want of a license, and of proper preparations, and such like, my service to you, my dear: and there is ceremony tantamount to your ceremony.
* Mr. Lovelace, in his next Letter, tells his friend how extremely ill
the Lady was, recovering from fits to fall into stronger fits, and
nobody expecting her life. She had not, he says, acquainted Miss Howe
how very ill she was.—In the next Letter, she tells Miss Howe, that her
motives for suspending were not merely ceremonious ones.
Do not, do not, my dear friend, again be so very melancholy a decliner as to prefer a shroud, when the matter you wish for is in your power; and when, as you have justly said heretofore, persons cannot die when they will.
But it is a strange perverseness in human nature that we slight that when near us which at a distance we wish for.