God have given to me.  I do not watch fearfully, lest his ungovernable temper and his selfish soul should be reproduced in them.  I trust that God will make them good and happy, and aid me in my efforts towards that end.  You cannot separate the idea of Francis from that of the woman who cheated you, and did not love you; who has blighted your hopes of domestic happiness; and who still, even from a distance, has the power to threaten you with exposing the disgrace that you are connected with her.  I am sorry that you cannot feel as I do; but if you can love these little girls, it may make you softer towards him.  When you wrote to me of your poor Mary’s sad death, and of the sadder life that had preceded it, I began to wonder whether, after all, your system of free choice in marriage produces greater happiness or greater misery than ours of a marriage settled by our parents.

“I recollect how bitterly I felt that I had been made over, without my wishes or tastes being consulted, to a man who cared so little for my happiness; but at least I had no illusion to be dispelled; I did not marry as your sister did, hoping to find Elysium, and landing in hopeless misery; and yet my parents loved me after their fashion.  I have often thought that those whom we love, and who love us, have far more power to injure us than those who hate us; but, alas! neither friends nor enemies can injure us more than we do ourselves.  Your sister Mary had the disenchantment to go through; I had to chafe at the coercion; while you, my friend, had to muse bitterly on the consequence of one rash speech of your own, which chained you to an unworthy and detested wife.

“I think we need a future state that we may do justice to ourselves in it quite as much as to repair the wrongs we may have done to others.  Which of us has really made the best of himself or herself?  I really try now for the sake of my children to be cheerful; but sad and bitter memories are too deeply interwoven with my being for me to succeed as I should wish.  If I live, I hope that the fate of my Clemence may be happier than her mother’s, so far as the state of society in France will allow of it:  I will give her a choice, and, at any rate, a power of refusing even what appears to me to be a suitable marriage; for no doubt it is better for an intelligent and responsible human being to choose its own destiny, and to run its own risks.  I fancy that the mistake in your English society is, that your girls have apparently the freedom of choice without being trained to make good use of it.  If your sister Mary was as inexperienced and as ignorant as I was at the time when my parents gave me to M. de Vericourt, she could not distinguish between the selfish fortune-hunter and the true lover; the conventional manners were all the same, and she chose for herself a life of misery.  Your interference only roused the spirit of opposition, and without preventing the marriage, made your brother-in-law regard you with