It is not altogether a bad world, for all that.  I certainly have not found it so; but then it has been my good fortune to draw near the hearts and brains of some very dear mortals.  I cannot tell you how fond I have grown of this creature,—­Gabriel Norton, I mean.  I can say this openly to you, because you are sensible and know me, and will not think at once, because he is a man and I a woman, that there is any question here of sentiments exceeding friendship.  We are neither of us children; he is three or four years older than I, I should imagine,—­twenty-nine or thirty, or thereabouts.

For aught I know, he may already have loved and lost as I have; and were it even possible that I should ever love again, I hardly think that Gabriel would be the man.  Anyway, we are excellent friends, and I believe that my companionship has become as precious to him as his is to me.  We meet now every two or three days, and walk together, either before breakfast or after early dinner.

Did your ears burn on Wednesday?  I told him a great deal about you.  We had been having one of our customary argumentative conversations, principally about marriage, more especially still about the horrors of false marriages, and this led me to tell him that the best friend I have on earth is infamously bound for the whole of her dear life by a marriage contracted before she was seventeen years old.  He thinks, dearest, with me, that you ought to face the horrors of the divorce court rather than linger on in chains, and certainly listen no longer to the considerations, pecuniary and otherwise, which influence your mother.

I fancy, from the way in which he spoke, that his father and mother were not happy together; he has therefore not had in his life the blessing that was mine,—­the daily contemplation of an absolutely perfect union.  Indeed, he hardly seems to believe in the possibility of ideal marriages, and declares that he himself will certainly never marry unless some law is passed whereby men and women shall be able to bind themselves for a limited number of years, at the expiration of which they may either renew the bond or go free.  I laughed when he said this, for I thought he was jesting; so he was, partly, yet more than half in earnest.

“No, no,” said he; “I shall never marry.  I had sooner not break the laws of my country, but if it came to be a question between breaking them or the laws of true morality, I should not hesitate in my choice.  Love without marriage is a sin against society; marriage without love is a sin against Nature.”

Of course he is right.  How my mother would have loved him!  Do you remember her invectives against marriage?  It was the very perfection of the tie between her and my father that filled her with indignation and regret whenever she looked about her and beheld, on all sides, the parody of her heaven.

Good-bye.  You are getting very lazy, Mrs. Norris.  How dare you leave me letterless so long?