To which truth I most heartily set my hand.

Twelve o’clock.

I have just heard from your sister, who tells me, Emily is turned a little natural philosopher, reads Ray, Derham, and fifty other strange old fellows that one never heard of, and is eternally poring through a microscope to discover the wonders of creation.

How amazingly learned matrimony makes young ladies!  I suppose we shall have a volume of her discoveries bye and bye.

She says too, you have little pets like sweethearts, quarrel and make it up again in the most engaging manner in the world.

This is just what I want to bring Fitzgerald to; but the perverse monkey won’t quarrel with me, do all I can:  I am sure this is not my fault, for I give him reason every day of his life.

Shenstone says admirably, “That reconciliation is the tenderest part of love and friendship:  the soul here discovers a kind of elasticity, and, being forced back, returns with an additional violence.”

Who would not quarrel for the pleasure of reconciliation!  I shall be very angry with Fitzgerald if he goes on in this mild way.

Tell your sister, she cannot be more mortified than I am, that it is impossible for me to be at her masquerade.

      Adieu!  Your affectionate
          A. Fitzgerald.

Don’t you think, my dear Rivers, that marriage, on prudent principles, is a horrid sort of an affair?  It is really cruel of papas and mammas to shut up two poor innocent creatures in a house together, to plague and torment one another, who might have been very happy separate.

Where people take their own time, and chuse for themselves, it is another affair, and I begin to think it possible affection may last through life.

I sometimes fancy to myself Fitzgerald and I loving on, from the impassioned hour when I first honored him with my hand, to that tranquil one, when we shall take our afternoon’s nap vis a vis in two arm chairs, by the fire-side, he a grave country justice, and I his worship’s good sort of a wife, the Lady Bountiful of the parish.

I have a notion there is nothing so very shocking in being an oldish gentlewoman; what one loses in charms, is made up in the happy liberty of doing and saying whatever one pleases.  Adieu!

LETTER 217.

To Captain Fitzgerald.

Bellfield, Nov. 16.

My relation, Colonel Willmott, is just arrived from the East Indies, rich, and full of the project of marrying his daughter to me.

My mother has this morning received a letter from him, pressing the affair with an earnestness which rather makes me feel for his disappointment, and wish to break it to him as gently as possible.

He talks of being at Bellfield on Wednesday evening, which is Temple’s masquerade; I shall stay behind at Bellfield, to receive him, have a domino ready, and take him to Temple-house.