Take back your letters; loathe the sight of them.
Take back the ring, and find, if you can, a woman who will never be
sick, never out of spirits, and who never will die. Thank heaven it
is not Katherine Mortimer.
These lines came to me in reply:
"Thank God it is not Kate Mortimer. I want an angel for my wife, not
a vixen. C. U."
Jan. 15-What a tempest-tossed creature this birthday finds me. But
let me finish this wretched, disgraceful story, if I can, before I
quite lose my senses.
I showed my mother the letters. She burst into tears and opened her
arms, and I ran into them as a wounded bird flies into the ark. We
cried together. Mother never said, never looked, "I told you so."
All she did say was this,
"God has heard my prayers! He is reserving better things for my
child!"
Dear mother's are not the only arms I have flown to. But it does not
seem as if God ought to take me in because I am in trouble, when I
would not go to him when I was happy in something else. But even in
the midst of my greatest felicity I had many and many a misgiving;
many a season when my conscience upbraided me for my willfulness
towards my dear mother, and my whole soul yearned for something
higher and better even than Charley's love, precious as it was.
Jan. 26.-I have shut myself up in my room to-day to think over
things. The end of it is that I am full of mortification and
confusion of face.
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