Pray believe that I am Your most sincere friend,
I have thought it best to tell Janet Fenwick what I have done.
I wonder what you will say to my news? But you must not scold me. Pray do not scold me. It could never, never have been as you wanted. I have engaged myself to marry my cousin, Captain Walter Marrable, who is a nephew of Sir Gregory Marrable, and a son of Colonel Marrable. We shall be very poor, having not more than £300 a-year above his pay as a captain; but if he had nothing, I think I should do the same. Do you remember how I used to doubt whether I should ever have that sort of love for a man for which I used to envy you? I don't envy you any longer, and I don't regard Mr. Fenwick as being nearly so divine as I used to do. I have a Jupiter of my own now, and need envy no woman the reality of her love.
I have written to Mr. Gilmore by the same post as will take this, and have just told him the bare truth. What else could I tell him? I have said something horribly stilted about esteem and friendship, which I would have left out, only that my letter seemed to be heartless without it. He has been to me as good as a man could be; but was it my fault that I could not love him? If you knew how I tried,--how I tried to make believe to myself that I loved him; how I tried to teach myself that that sort of very chill approbation was the nearest approach to love that I could ever reach; and how I did this because you bade me;--if you could understand all this, then you would not scold me. And I did almost believe that it was so. But now--! Oh, dear! how would it have been if I had engaged myself to Mr. Gilmore, and that then Walter Marrable had come to me! I get sick when I think how near I was to saying that I would love a man whom I never could have loved.
Of course I used to ask myself what I should do with myself. I suppose every woman living has to ask and to answer that question. I used to try to think that it would be well not to think of the outer crust of myself. What did it matter whether things were soft to me or not? I could do my duty. And as this man was good, and a gentleman, and endowed with high qualities and appropriate tastes, why should he not have the wife he wanted? I thought that I could pretend to love him, till, after some fashion, I should love him; but as I think of it now, all this seems to be so horrid! I know now what to do with myself. To be his from head to foot! To feel that nothing done for him would be mean or distasteful! To stand at a washtub and wash his clothes, if it were wanted. Oh, Janet, I used to dread the time in which he would have to put his arm round me and kiss me! I cannot tell you what I feel now about that other he.
