“Your feelings I perfectly understand, I will even whisper to you I approve. . . . But you must remember that your position is very extraordinary, and though when we have sufficiently deliberated and decided, we should pursue our course without embarrassing ourselves with the consequences, yet we should not neglect the means of fully justifying ourselves if the necessity be ever imposed upon us. I see the possibility of a con-
conversation and manner, with something young about the still well-cut face, the light in her eyes and agreeable voice. She spelt her name Therese in all the signatures I have seen. 1 Colonel Doyle to Lady Byron, July 9th, 1816. 2 [See Chapters IX. and X.; also Introduction, p. ix.—Ed.] 3 Sir Leslie Stephen said it made him quite uncomfortable to read Mrs. Leigh’s letters of humiliation dated 1816. That she could have written as she did, considering all the circumstances of the whole miserable story seemed “to imply the sort of moral idiocy of which Lady Byron speaks. To print the letters would seem to be superfluous and any superfluous printing would, on my view, be a mistake.” (Letter to the Earl of Lovelace, April 1st, 1900.) |
| 58 |
| MANFRED |
“The step you have taken was attended with great risk, and I could not, contemplating the danger to which it might have exposed you, have originally advised it. If however your correspondence has produced an acknowledgment of the fact even previous to your marriage I shall be most happy that it has taken place.”
