"Always, dear Hermia, yours most sincerely,
"Frank Derison."
This characteristic epistle elicited the following reply:
"Dear Frank,
"The contents of your letter caused me very little surprise, and what I did experience was of a pleasurable kind. For some time past it has been plain to me that the tie which bound us, slight though it was, had become irksome to you, and that its severance would be hailed by you as a relief. To me, almost from the first, it has been as a chain that galled and fretted me; and your having written me as you have, has merely anticipated by a few days a step which I had fully made up my mind to take on my own account.
"To be candid with you--and surely in such a matter candor is of the first importance--my feelings towards you were never of a kind to warrant me in entering into any engagement with you, nor do I believe that time would do anything towards effecting a change in them. A year ago I was led away by your impassioned words, and by a certain amount of self-deception on my own part, into believing that I might, after a while, come to care for you in the way you wanted me to do. But I was not long in finding out that I had made a great mistake; and now you on your side have made a similar discovery. Let us hope that, taught by experience, both of us will be wiser in time to come.
"Always your friend and well-wisher,
"Hermia Rivers."
This was not at all the kind of answer that Frank had looked for. Far from expressing the slightest regret, or indignation--he could have borne a little indignation with equanimity--Hermy seemed actually to welcome her release! But, of course, as he told himself, he knew better than to credit her assertions. Her pride would not allow her to let him see how deeply she was wounded; as was but natural, she tried to carry it off with a high hand; but he was not to be so easily hoodwinked. All the same, the tone of her reply did not fail to jar against the self-love which was one of his most pronounced characteristics; and not for a long time to come was he able to rid himself of an uneasy consciousness that his treatment of Hermia had been anything rather than that of a man of honor and a gentleman; and Frank had a great desire to pose as both--as though the two were not synonymous--not only before the world at large, but in the clearer eyes of his own conscience.