I am in great apprehension. Yet cannot help repeating my humble thanks
to your mother and you for your last favour. I hope her kind end is
answered by the contents of my last. Yet I must not think it enough to
acknowledge her goodness to me, with a pencil only, on the cover of a
letter sealed up. A few lines give me leave to write with regard to my
anonymous letter to Lady Drayton. If I did not at that time tell you, as
I believe I did, that my excellent Mrs. Norton gave me her assistance in
that letter, I now acknowledge that she did.
Pray let your mother know this, for two reasons: one, that I may not be
thought to arrogate to myself a discretion which does not belong to me;
the other, that I may not suffer by the severe, but just inference she
was pleased to draw; doubling my faults upon me, if I myself should act
unworthy of the advice I was supposed to give.
Before I come to what most nearly affects us all, I must chide you once
more, for the severe, the very severe things you mention of our family,
to the disparagement of their MORALS. Indeed, my dear, I wonder at
you!--A slighter occasion might have passed me, after I had written to
you so often to so little purpose, on this topic. But, affecting as
my own circumstances are, I cannot pass by, without animadversion, the
reflection I need not repeat in words.
There is not a worthier woman in England than my mother. Nor is my
father that man you sometimes make him. Excepting in one point, I know
not any family which lives more up to their duty, than the principals of
ours. A little too uncommunicative for their great circumstances--that
is all.--Why, then, have they not reason to insist upon unexceptionable
morals in a man whose sought-for relationship to them, by a marriage
in their family, they have certainly a right either to allow of, or to
disallow.
Another line or two, before I am engrossed by my own concerns--upon your
treatment of Mr. Hickman. Is it, do you think, generous to revenge upon
an innocent person, the displeasure you receive from another quarter,
where, I doubt, you are a trespasser too?--But one thing I could tell
him; and you have best not provoke me to it: It is this, That no woman
uses ill the man she does not absolutely reject, but she has it in her
heart to make him amends, when her tyranny has had its run, and he
has completed the measure of his services and patience. My mind is not
enough at ease to push this matter further.