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 TOHAVE 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 be a CLENCHER,if he did.How ought I to behave when I go back?Advise a fool,who had nearly lost a Goddess by his folly.
The thing was,I could not think it possible she would ever like ME.
Her taste is singular,but not the worse for that.I'd rather have her love,or liking (call it what you will)than empires.I deserve to call her mine;for nothing else CAN atone for what I've gone through for her.I hope your next letter will not reverse all,and then I shall be happy till I see her,--one of the blest when I do see her,if she looks like my own beautiful love.I may perhaps write a line when I come to my right wits.--Farewel at present,and thank you a thousand times for what you have done for your poor friend.
P.S.--I like what M----said about her sister,much.There are good people in the world:I begin to see it,and believe it.
