ure not of myself: 'tis not in my power (I would to
God it was!) to hide a kindness where I have one, or dissemble it where
I have none. I cannot help answering your letter this minute, and
telling you I infinitely love you, though, it may be, you'll call the
one impertinence, and the other dissimulation; but you may think what
you please of me, I must eternally think the same things of you."

Lady Mary was occasionally wearisome owing to the reiteration of the
assurance that she believed her letters to be dull, the more so as she
certainly was conscious of the skill with which she composed them. "What
do you mean by complaining I never write to you in the quiet situation
of mind I do to other people?" she asks Anne Wortley. "My dear, people
never write calmly, but when they write indifferently."

After a letter dated September 5, 1709, a passage from which has been
printed here, there is a break in the (preserved) correspondence. In the
spring of the following year Anne Wortley died, and Lady Mary, on March
28, paid tribute to her departed friend, addressing herself for the
first time direct to Montagu.

"Perhaps you'll be surprized at this letter; I have had many debates
with myself before I could resolve on it. I know it is not acting in
form, but I do not look upon you as I do upon the rest of the world, and
by what I do for _you_, you are not to judge my manner of acting with
others. You are brother to a woman I tenderly loved; my protestations of
friendship are not like other people's, I never speak but what I mean,
and when I say I love, 'tis for ever. I had that real concern for Mrs.
Wortley, I look with some regard on every one that is related to her.
This and my long acquaintance with you may in some measure excuse what I
am now doing. I am surprized at one of the 'Tatlers' you send me; is it
possible to have any sort of esteem for a person one believes capable of
having such trifling inclinations? Mr. Bickerstaff has very wrong
notions of our sex. I can say there are some of us that despise charms
of show, and all the pageantry of greatness, perhaps with more ease than
any of the philosophers. In contemning the world, they seem to take
pains to contemn it; we despise it, without taking the pains to read
lessons of morality to make us do it. At least I know I have always
looked upon it with contempt, without being at the expense of one
serious reflection to oblige me to it. I carry the matter yet farther;