Letters of Two Brides

This difficulty, the first which has arisen, is the only one

which has delayed the completion of our marriage. Although, at first,

I may have made up my mind to accept anything rather than return to

the convent, it is only in human nature, having got an inch, to ask

for an ell, and you and I, sweet love, are of those who would have it

all. I watched Louis out of the corner of my eye, and put it to myself,

"Has suffering had a softening or a hardening effect on him?" By dint

of close study, I arrived at the conclusion that his love amounted to

a passion.

Once transformed into an idol, whose slightest frown would

turn him white and trembling, I realized that I might venture

anything. I drew him aside in the most natural manner on solitary

walks, during which I discreetly sounded his feelings. I made him

talk, and got him to expound to me his ideas and plans for our future.

My questions betrayed so many preconceived notions, and went so

straight for the weak points in this terrible dual existence, that

Louis has since confessed to me the alarm it caused him to find in me

so little of the ignorant maiden.

Then I listened to what he had to say in reply. He got mixed up in his

arguments, as people do when handicapped by fear; and before long it

became clear that chance had given me for adversary one who was the

less fitted for the contest because he was conscious of what you

magniloquently call my "greatness of soul." Broken by sufferings and

misfortune, he looked on himself as a sort of wreck, and three fears

in especial haunted him.

First, we are aged respectively thirty-seven and seventeen; and he

could not contemplate without quaking the twenty years that divide us.

In the next place, he shares our views on the subject of my beauty,

and it is cruel for him to see how the hardships of his life have

robbed him of youth. Finally, he felt the superiority of my womanhood

over his manhood. The consciousness of these three obvious drawbacks

made him distrustful of himself; he doubted his power to make me

happy, and guessed that he had been chosen as the lesser of two evils.

One evening he tentatively suggested that I only married him to escape

the convent. "I cannot deny it," was my grave reply.

My dear, it touched me to the heart to see the two great tears which

stood in his eyes. Never before had I experienced the shock of emotion

which a man can impart to us.