After all, why should I wonder?  I may be sorry, for who ever saw gladly love—­the one all-good thing on this earth, most of whose good things are adulterated and dirt-smirched—­who ever saw it gladly slip away from them?  But I cannot be surprised.

With Roger, love and trust must ever go hand-in-hand; and, when the one has gone, the other must needs soon follow.

After all, what he loved in me was a delusion—­had never existed.  It was my blunt honesty, my transparent candor, the open-hearted downrightness that in me amounted to a misfortune, that had at first attracted him.  And now that he has found that the unpolished abruptness of my manners can conceal as great an amount of deception as the most insinuating silkiness of any one else’s, I do not see what there is left in me to attract him.  Certainly I have no beauty to excite a man’s passions, nor any genius to enchain his intellect, nor even any pretty accomplishment to amuse his leisure.

Why should he love me?  Because I am his wife?  Nay, nay! who ever loved because it was their duty? who ever succeeded in putting love in harness, and driving him?  Sooner than be the object of such up-hill conscientious affection, I had far rather be treated with cold indifference—­active hatred even.  Because I am young?  That seems no recommendation in his eyes!  Because I love him?  He does not believe it.  Once or twice I have tried to tell him so, and he has gently pooh-poohed me.

Sometimes it has occurred to me that, perhaps, if I had him all to myself, I might even yet bring him back to me—­might reconcile him to my paucity of attractions, and persuade him of my honesty; but what chance have I, when every day, every hour of the day if he likes to put himself to such frequent pain, he may see and bitterly note the contrast between the woman of his choice and the woman of his fate—­the woman from whom he is irrevocably parted, and the woman to whom he is as irrevocably joined.  And I think that hardly a day passes that he does not give himself the opportunity of instituting the comparison.

Not that he is unkind to me; do not think that.  It would be impossible to Roger to be unkind to any thing, much more to any weakly woman thing that is quite in his own power.  No, no! there is no fear of that.  I have no need to be a grizzle.  I have no cross words, no petulances, no neglects even, to bear.  But oh! in all his friendly words, in all his kindly, considerate actions, what a chill there is!  It is as if some one that had been a day dead laid his hand on my heart!

How many, many miles farther apart we are now, than we were when I was here, and he in Antigua; albeit then the noisy winds roared and sung, and the brown billows tumbled between us!  If he would but hit me, or box my ears, as Bobby has so often done—­a good swinging, tingling box, that made one see stars, and incarnadized all one side of one’s countenance—­oh, how much, much less would it hurt than do the frosty dullness of his smiles, the uncaressing touch of his cool hands!