First, indeed, she turned to the signature--'Eugénie de Pastourelles.' Why, pray, should Madame de Pastourelles write these long letters to another woman's husband? The hands which held them shook with anger and misery. These pages filled with discussion of art and books, which had seemed to the woman of European culture, and French associations, so natural to write, which had been written as the harmless and kindly occupation of an idle hour, with the shades of Madame de Sévigné and Madame du Deffand standing by, were messengers of terror and despair to this ignorant and yet sentimental Westmoreland girl. Why should they be written at all to _her_ John, her own husband? No nice woman that she had ever known wrote long letters to married men. What could have been the object of writing these pages and pages about John's pictures and John's prospects?--affected stuff!--and what was the meaning of these appointments to see pictures, these invitations to St. James's Square, these thanks 'for the kind and charming things you say'--above all, of the constant and crying omission, throughout these delicately written sheets, of any mention whatever of Fenwick's wife and child? But of course for the two correspondents whom these letters implied, such dull, stupid creatures did not exist.
Ah! but wait a moment. Her eye caught a sentence--then fastened greedily on the following passage:
'I hardly like to repeat what I said the other day--you will think me a very intrusive person!--but when you talk of melancholy and loneliness, of feeling the strain of competition, and the nervous burden of work, so that you are sometimes tempted to give it up altogether, I can't help repeating that some day a wife will save you from all this. I have seen so much of artists!--they of all men should marry. It is quite a delusion to suppose that art--whatever art means--is enough for them, or for anybody. Imagination is the most exhausting of all professions!--and if we women are good for nothing else we _can_ be cushions--we can "stop a chink and keep the wind away." So pay no attention, please, to my father's diatribes. You will very soon be prosperous--sooner perhaps than you think. A _home_ is what you want.'