uth for a
month, but she had already been there six weeks, and was still under
her aunt's wing.

Yarmouth, October, 186--.

DEAREST ALICE,

Of course I am delighted. It is no good saying that I am
not. I know how difficult it is to deal with you, and
therefore I sit down to answer your letter with fear and
trembling, lest I should say a word too much, and thereby
drive you back, or not say quite enough and thereby fail
to encourage you on. Of course I am glad. I have long
thought that Mr Grey could not make you happy, and as
I have thought so, how can I not be glad? It is no use
saying that he is good and noble, and all that sort of
thing. I have never denied it. But he was not suited to
you, and his life would have made you wretched. Ergo, I
rejoice. And as you are the dearest friend I have, of
course I rejoice mightily.

I can understand accurately the sort of way in which
the interview went. Of course he had the best of it.
I can see him so plainly as he stood up in unruffled
self-possession, ignoring all that you said, suggesting
that you were feverish or perhaps bilious, waving his
hand over you a little, as though that might possibly do
you some small good, and then taking his leave with an
assurance that it would be all right as soon as the wind
changed. I suppose it's very noble in him, not taking you
at your word, and giving you, as it were, another chance;
but there is a kind of nobility which is almost too great
for this world. I think very well of you, my dear, as
women go, but I do not think well enough of you to believe
that you are fit to be Mr John Grey's wife.

Of course I'm very glad. You have known my mind from the
first to the last, and, therefore, what would be the good
of my mincing matters? No woman wishes her dearest friend
to marry a man to whom she herself is antipathetic. You
would have been as much lost to me, had you become Mrs
Grey of Nethercoats, Cambridgeshire, as though you had
gone to heaven. I don't say but what Nethercoats may be a
kind of heaven,--but then one doesn't wish one's friend
that distant sort of happiness. A flat Eden I can fancy
it, hemmed in by broad dykes, in which cream and eggs are
very plentiful, where an Adam and an Eve might drink the
choicest tea out of the finest china, with toast buttered
to perfection, from year's end to ye