Sévigné was wise, and so is Dorothy. She read and could criticise, she read and remembered. With less philosophy, and no fatalism, she looked her world in the face, and had no illusions about it. But she was in love, and it was a good world. Cheerfulness kept breaking in. “What an age we live in, where ’tis a miracle if in ten couples that are married, two of them live so as not to publish to the world that they cannot agree.” Yet she thinks that one should follow the Saviour’s precept, take up the cross and follow. She believes that the trouble is mostly of the woman’s making, for as for the husband, if he grumbles, and the wife says nothing, he will stop for lack of nutriment, and nobody be any the worse. A splenetic husband of her acquaintance had the trick, when harassed, of rising in the night and banging the table with a club. His wife provided a stout cushion for the table, and was not disturbed.
Sévigné is merry, and so is Dorothy, though much more demure. In her seventy letters you will find no _tours de force_--nothing like the “prairie” letter, the marriage-of-Mademoiselle, or the “incendie” letter. She can touch you off a situation in a phrase excellently well, as when after a quarrel comes a reconciliation between her and her brother Henry, and she says, “’Tis wonderful to see what curtseys and legs pass between us; and as before we were thought the kindest brother and sister, we are certainly now the most complimental couple in England”; or, asking “Is it true my Lord Whitelocke goes Ambassador?” she comments upon him, “He was never meant for a courtier at home, I believe. Yet ’tis a gracious Prince.” Another Commonwealth lord, whose title depended upon the standing of the Court of Chancery, has a flick in the same letter: “’Twill be sad news for my Lord Keble’s son. He will have nothing left to say when ‘my Lord, my father,’ is taken from him.” Those are both brisk and pleasant; more ambitious is her discussion of the “ingredients” of a husband, which opens with sketches of impossible husbands. He “must not be so much of a country gentleman as to understand nothing but horses and dogs, and be fonder of either than his wife”; nor one “whose aim reaches no further than to be Justice of the Peace, and once in his life High Sheriff”; nor “a thing that began the world in a free school ... and is at his furthest when he reaches the Inns of Court.” He must not be “a town gallant neither, that lives in a tavern and an ordinary,” who “makes court to all the women he sees, thinks they believe him, and laughs and is laughed at equally”; nor a “travelled Monsieur, whose head is all feather inside and outside, that can talk of nothing but dances and duels, and has courage enough to wear slashes when everybody else dies of cold to see him.” In fact, “he must love me, and I him, as much as we are capable of.” Those impersonations might have come as well from Belmont as from Chicksands.