for they know (as well as I do) that
you couldn't fail to find out the trick in a month, and would turn her
into the street the next moment, though she were twenty times your
wife--and that, as to the consequences of doing so, you would laugh at
them, even if you couldn't escape from them.--I shall lose the post if I
say more.

Believe me,

Ever truly your friend,

C. P.

LETTER XIII

My dear P----, You have saved my life. If I do not keep friends with
her now, I deserve to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. She is an angel
from Heaven, and you cannot pretend I ever said a word to the contrary!
The little rogue must have liked me from the first, or she never could
have stood all these hurricanes without slipping her cable. What could
she find in me? "I have mistook my person all this while," &c. Do you
know I saw a picture, the very pattern of her, the other day, at
Dalkeith Palace (Hope finding Fortune in the Sea), just before this
blessed news came, and the resemblance drove me almost out of my senses.
Such delicacy, such fulness, such perfect softness, such buoyancy, such
grace! If it is not the very image of her, I am no judge.--You have the
face to doubt my making the best husband in the world; you might as well
doubt it if I was married to one of the Houris of Paradise. She is a
saint, an angel, a love. If she deceives me again, she kills me. But I
will have such a kiss when I get back, as shall last me twenty years.
May God bless her for not utterly disowning and destroying me! What an
exquisite little creature it is, and how she holds out to the last in
her system of consistent contradictions! Since I wrote to you about
making a formal proposal, I have had her face constantly before me,
looking so like some faultless marble statue, as cold, as fixed and
graceful as ever statue did; the expression (nothing was ever like
THAT!) seemed to say--"I wish I could love you better than I do, but
still I will be yours." No, I'll never believe again that she will not
be mine; for I think she was made on purpose for me. If there's anyone
else that understands that turn of her head as I do, I'll give her up
without scruple. I have made up my mind to this, never to dream of
another woman, while she even thinks it worth her while to REFUSE TO
HAVE ME. You see I am not hard to please, after all. Did M---- know
of the intimacy that had subsisted between us? Or did you hint at it?
I think it would b