fathers, I could write pages if I were to tell you all the scenes
that have taken place in this house because of us
two....Constanze is not ugly, but anything but beautiful; all her
beauty consists of two little black eyes and a handsome figure.
She is not witty but has enough common sense to be able to
perform her duties as wife and mother. She is not inclined to
finery,--that is utterly false; on the contrary, she is generally
ill clad, for the little that the mother was able to do for her
children was done for the other two--nothing for her. True she
likes to be neatly and cleanly, though not extravagantly,
dressed, and she can herself make most of the clothes that a
woman needs; she also dresses her own hair every day, understands
housekeeping, has the best heart in the world,--tell me, could I
wish a better wife?"

(Vienna, December 15, 1781, to his father. Constanze seems to
have been made for Mozart; they went through the years of their
brief wedded life like two children.)

194. "Dearest, best of friends!"

"Surely you will let me call you that? You can not hate me so
greatly as not to permit me to be your friend, and yourself to
become mine? And even if you do not want to be my friend longer,
you can not forbid me to think kindly of you as I have been in
the habit of doing. Consider well what you said to me today.
Despite my entreaties you gave me the mitten three times and told
me to my face that you would have nothing further to do with me.
I, to whom it is not such a matter of indifference as it is to
you to lose a sweetheart, am not so hot tempered, inconsiderate