“——I had a disagreeable dinner yesterday at Alexander’s with a parcel of miserables, who seemed, so far as I could collect, to know nothing of the stranger who sat down with them, and to have no desire to hear anything from him: but I had a very pleasant walk home across the fields, to White’s Conduit House.
“How happy should I be, if I could persuade you to look at human life through different optics! There are persons, perhaps, so constituted that they must see all creation in sables: there is, too, a sort of refinement in regarding all the world with loathing and aversion, in which a sickly temper is too apt to indulge. But, separately from these two causes, almost all the lives of individuals are made up of a dark and a bright side; and yours is not, in itself considered, the worst. We ought all to consider that we have but one life to make the best or the worst of, as imagination shall prompt us. But all prudence and all wisdom bids us make the best of it. You are surrounded with many comforts, you have a boy that you love, you have not the worst of husbands; our principal embarrassments are on the point of being cleared off, and we must then be very unlucky if we are not able to continue to supply our wants . . . .
“. . . . Tell Fanny I am very well, and have found no want as yet of her kind cares. Charles has taken the cook’s account, and performed the offices of an able housekeeper and superintendent.”
