, but the truth is that I was greatly affected at
the moment, and the proof of it is that I and Jansenius (the only
other person who cared) behaved in a most unbecoming fashion, as men
invariably do when they are really upset. Perfect propriety at a death
is seldom achieved except by the undertaker, who has the advantage of
being free from emotion.

Your rigmarole (if you will excuse the word) about the tombstone gives
quite a wrong idea of my attitude on that occasion. I stayed away from
the funeral for reasons which are, I should think, sufficiently obvious
and natural, but which you somehow seem to have missed. Granted that my
fancy for Hetty was only a cloud of illusions, still I could not, within
a few days of her sudden death, go in cold blood to take part in a
grotesque and heathenish mummery over her coffin. I should have
broken out and strangled somebody. But on every other point I--weakly
enough--sacrificed my own feelings to those of Jansenius. I let him
have his funeral, though I object to funerals and to the practice of
sepulture. I consented to a monument, although there is, to me, no more
bitterly ridiculous outcome of human vanity than the blocks raised to
tell posterity that John Smith, or Jane Jackson, late of this parish,
was born, lived, and died worth enough money to pay a mason to
distinguish their bones from those of the unrecorded millions. To
gratify Jansenius I waived this objection, and only interfered to save
him from being fleeced and fooled by an unnecessary West End middleman,
who, as likely as not, would have eventually employed the very man to
whom I gave the job. Even the epitaph was not mine. If I had had my way
I should have written: "HENRIETTA JANSENIUS WAS BORN ON SUCH A DATE,
MARRIED A MAN NAMED TREFUSIS, AND DIED ON SUCH ANOTHER DATE; AND NOW
WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHETHER SHE DID OR NOT?" The whole notion conveyed
in the book that I rode rough-shod over everybody in the affair, and
only consulted my own feelings, is the very reverse of the truth.

As to the tomfoolery down at Brandon's, which ended in Erskine and
myself marrying the young lady visitors there, I can only congratulate
you on the determination with which you have striven to make something
like a romance out of such very thin material. I cannot say that I
remember it all exactly as you have described it; my wife declares
flatly there is not a word of truth in it as far as she is concerned,
and Mrs. Erskine steadily ref