'Dear Lady Petherwin--don't be so unreasonable as to blame a live person
for living! No woman's head is so small as to be filled for life by a
memory of a few months. Four years have passed since I last saw my boy-
husband. We were mere children; see how I have altered since in mind,
substance, and outline--I have even grown half an inch taller since his
death. Two years will exhaust the regrets of widows who have long been
faithful wives; and ought I not to show a little new life when my husband
died in the honeymoon?'

'No. Accepting the protection of your husband's mother was, in effect,
an avowal that you rejected the idea of being a widow to prolong the idea
of being a wife; and the sin against your conventional state thus assumed
is almost as bad as would have been a sin against the married state
itself. If you had gone off when he died, saying, "Thank heaven, I am
free!" you would, at any rate, have shown some real honesty.'

'I should have been more virtuous by being more unfeeling. That often
happens.'

'I have taken to you, and made a great deal of you--given you the
inestimable advantages of foreign travel and good society to enlarge your
mind. In short, I have been like a Naomi to you in everything, and I
maintain that writing these poems saps the foundation of it all.'

'I do own that you have been a very good Naomi to me thus far; but Ruth
was quite a fast widow in comparison with me, and yet Naomi never blamed
her. You are unfortunate in your illustration. But it is dreadfully
flippant of me to answer you like this, for you have been kind. But why
will you provoke me!'