But I need not take much merit for acting as I ought to do.  This same Mr. Vanbeest Brown is by no means so very ardent a lover as to hurry the object of his attachment into such inconsiderate steps.  He gives one full time to reflect, that must be admitted.  However, I will not blame him unheard, nor permit myself to doubt the manly firmness of a character which I have so often extolled to you.  Were he capable of doubt, of fear, of the shadow of change, I should have little to regret.

’And why, you will say, when I expect such steady and unalterable constancy from a lover, why should I be anxious about what Hazlewood does, or to whom he offers his attentions?  I ask myself the question a hundred times a day, and it only receives the very silly answer that one does not like to be neglected, though one would not encourage a serious infidelity.

’I write all these trifles because you say that they amuse you, and yet I wonder how they should.  I remember, in our stolen voyages to the world of fiction, you always admired the grand and the romantic,—­tales of knights, dwarfs, giants, and distressed damsels, soothsayers, visions, beckoning ghosts, and bloody hands; whereas I was partial to the involved intrigues of private life, or at farthest to so much only of the supernatural as is conferred by the agency of an Eastern genie or a beneficent fairy.  You would have loved to shape your course of life over the broad ocean, with its dead calms and howling tempests, its tornadoes, and its billows mountain-high; whereas I should like to trim my little pinnace to a brisk breeze in some inland lake or tranquil bay, where there was just difficulty of navigation sufficient to give interest and to require skill without any sensible degree of danger.  So that, upon the whole, Matilda, I think you should have had my father, with his pride of arms and of ancestry, his chivalrous point of honour, his high talents, and his abstruse and mystic studies.  You should have had Lucy Bertram too for your friend, whose fathers, with names which alike defy memory and orthography, ruled over this romantic country, and whose birth took place, as I have been indistinctly informed, under circumstances of deep and peculiar interest.  You should have had, too, our Scottish residence, surrounded by mountains, and our lonely walks to haunted ruins.  And I should have had, in exchange, the lawns and shrubs, and green-houses and conservatories, of Pine Park, with your good, quiet, indulgent aunt, her chapel in the morning, her nap after dinner, her hand at whist in the evening, not forgetting her fat coach-horses and fatter coachman.  Take notice, however, that Brown is not included in this proposed barter of mine; his good-humour, lively conversation, and open gallantry suit my plan of life as well as his athletic form, handsome features, and high spirit would accord with a character of chivalry.  So, as we cannot change altogether out and out, I think we must e’en abide as we are.’