I have seen a quarrel of this kind last longer than a year. It was a woman of the greatest distinction who sacrificed all her happiness, sooner than give her lover the chance of entertaining the slightest possible doubt of the magnanimity of her pride. The reconciliation was the work of chance, and, on my friend's side, due to a moment of weakness, which, on meeting her lover, she was unable to overcome. She imagined him forty miles away, and found him in a place, where certainly he did not expect to see her. She could not hide the first transports of delight; her lover was more overcome than she; they almost fell at each other's feet and never have I seen tears flow so abundantly—it was the unlooked-for appearance of happiness. Tears are the supreme smile.
The Duke of Argyll gave a fine example of presence of mind, in not drawing Feminine Pride into a combat, in the interview he had at Richmond with Queen Caroline.[1] The more nobility in a woman's character, the more terrible are these storms—
As the blackest sky
Foretells the heaviest tempest.
(Don Juan.)
Can it be that the more fervently, in the normal course of life, a woman delights in the rare qualities of her lover, the more she tries, in those cruel moments, when sympathy seems turned to the reverse, to wreak her vengeance on what usually she sees in him superior to other people? She is afraid of being confounded with them.
It is a precious long time since I read that boring Clarissa; but I think it is through feminine pride that she lets herself die, and does not accept the hand of Lovelace.
Lovelace's fault was great; but as she did love him a little, she could have found pardon in her heart for a crime, of which the cause was love.
Monime, on the contrary, seems to me a touching model of feminine delicacy. What cheek does not blush with pleasure to hear from the lips of an actress worthy of the part:—
That fatal love which I had crushed and conquered,
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