At last I can give a more favourable answer to your letters. Emily is
now quite out of danger. Since the day you forced yourself, with such a
disinterested regard for her health and reputation, into her room, she
grew (no thanks to your forbearance) gradually better. I trust that she
will be able to see you in a few days. I hope this the more, because she
now feels and decides that it will be for the last time. You have, it is
true, injured her happiness for life her virtue, thank Heaven, is yet
spared; and though you have made her wretched, you will never, I trust,
succeed in making her despised.
You ask me, with some menacing and more complaint, why I am so bitter
against you. I will tell you. I not only know Emily, and feel
confident, from that knowledge, that nothing can recompense her for the
reproaches of conscience, but I know you, and am convinced that you are
the last man to render her happy. I set aside, for the moment, all rules
of religion and morality in general, and speak to you (to use the cant
and abused phrase) "without prejudice" as to the particular instance.
Emily's nature is soft and susceptible, yours fickle and wayward in the
extreme. The smallest change or caprice in you, which would not be
noticed by a mind less delicate, would wound her to the heart. You know
that the very softness of her character arises from its want of strength.
Consider, for a moment, if she could bear the humiliation and disgrace
which visit so heavily the offences of an English wife? She has been
brought up in the strictest notions of morality; and, in a mind, not
naturally strong, nothing can efface the first impressions of education.
She is not--indeed she is not--fit for a life of sorrow or degradation.
In another character, another line of conduct might be desirable; but
with regard to her, pause, Falkland, I beseech you, before you attempt
again to destroy her for ever. I have said all. Farewell.
Your, and above all, Emily's friend.