It is true of me—­very true—­that I have not a high appreciation of what passes in the world (and not merely the Tomkins-world!) under the name of love; and that a distrust of the thing had grown to be a habit of mind with me when I knew you first.  It has appeared to me, through all the seclusion of my life and the narrow experience it admitted of, that in nothing men—­and women too—­were so apt to mistake their own feelings, as in this one thing.  Putting falseness quite on one side, quite out of sight and consideration, an honest mistaking of feeling appears wonderfully common, and no mistake has such frightful results—­none can.  Self-love and generosity, a mistake may come from either—­from pity, from admiration, from any blind impulse—­oh, when I look at the histories of my own female friends—­to go no step further!  And if it is true of the women, what must the other side be?  To see the marriages which are made every day! worse than solitudes and more desolate!  In the case of the two happiest I ever knew, one of the husbands said in confidence to a brother of mine—­not much in confidence or I should not have heard it, but in a sort of smoking frankness,—­that he had ‘ruined his prospects by marrying’; and the other said to himself at the very moment of professing an extraordinary happiness, ...  ’But I should have done as well if I had not married her.’

Then for the falseness—­the first time I ever, in my own experience, heard that word which rhymes to glove and comes as easily off and on (on some hands!)—­it was from a man of whose attentions to another woman I was at that time her confidante.  I was bound so to silence for her sake, that I could not even speak the scorn that was in me—­and in fact my uppermost feeling was a sort of horror ... a terror—­for I was very young then, and the world did, at the moment, look ghastly!

The falseness and the calculations!—­why how can you, who are just, blame women ... when you must know what the ‘system’ of man is towards them,—­and of men not ungenerous otherwise?  Why are women to be blamed if they act as if they had to do with swindlers?—­is it not the mere instinct of preservation which makes them do it?  These make women what they are.  And your ‘honourable men,’ the most loyal of them, (for instance) is it not a rule with them (unless when taken unaware through a want of self-government) to force a woman (trying all means) to force a woman to stand committed in her affections ... (they with their feet lifted all the time to trample on her for want of delicacy) before they risk the pin-prick to their own personal pitiful vanities?  Oh—­to see how these things are set about by men! to see how a man carefully holding up on each side the skirts of an embroidered vanity to keep it quite safe from the wet, will contrive to tell you in so many words that he ... might love you if the sun shone!  And women are to be blamed!  Why there are, to