Let us take courage, then, and learn to find in the disturbing movements of our time a deeper and ever deeper significance. I send this with the most earnest prayer that your union will be abundantly blessed.
Yours in a very real sense, AMPHIBOLUS DIVES
Juliet Savage did not like this letter. She said Canon Dives would argue the hind leg off a donkey. She also said she supposed, according to him, the question of whether a wife was true to her husband would have to be relative to her velocity. I confess I felt even at the time that there was a hitch about it somewhere. I will only quote one other letter, which came to me from Miss Linthorpe’s old butler: she had made comfortable provision for him, and he now lived not far from us in Hertfordshire:
I hope you will excuse the liberty of me and Mrs. Hodges sending our warmest congrats on the news we have seen reported in the paper. It seems very hard that poor Miss Linthorpe never lived to see you settled down comfortably. But it’s not for us to quarrel with Providence. I hope the young gentleman will settle down with you in England and make you very happy, which you deserve. And don’t you be led away, Miss Opal, if you will excuse me mentioning it, by all the talk there is about unhappy marriages and married folks not getting on by reason of incomparability of temper. I may be old-fashioned, but what I say is (and Mrs. Hodges the same) that if you’ve met Mr. Right you’ll _be_ right, and you won’t ever let anything come between you, as some do. “The world has changed a great deal, Hodges,” as Miss Linthorpe said to me more than once, “since you and I went to school, but a man and a woman’s a man and a woman now as much as ever, even if the woman does get herself up in trousers and spats” (you’ll excuse my mentioning it, but those were Miss Linthorpe’s words, you know the way she had). And to my way of thinking a man and a woman _are_ a man and a woman, so long as they don’t let anything come between them, as some do. I hear over in America they’re very free and easy with their marriages, and no sooner married than divorced, they tell me; but I’m sure your young gentleman isn’t like that, and won’t let anything come between you, which would not be natural considering what you are and how you will always, I am sure and Mrs. Hodges the same, make a good wife to him. So you will excuse an old man that has watched you grow up, Miss Opal, since the old days when you used to come over from Barstoke, sending my warmest congrats, and praying the Lord to bless you, as he did Rebecca and Rachel and Hannah in the Holy Bible, and Mrs. Hodges the same.