If I Could Not Be

I Do Not Think I Ever Opened A Book In My Life Which Had Not Something To Say Upon Woman's Inconstancy. Songs And Proverbs, All Talk Of Woman's Fickleness. But Perhaps You Will Say, These Were All Written By Men.

If Any One Faculty Of Our Nature May Be Called More Wonderful Than The Rest, I Do Think It Is Memory. There Seems Something More Speakingly Incomprehensible In The Powers, The Failures, The Inequalities Of Memory, Than In Any Other Of Our Intelligences. The Memory Is Sometimes So Retentive, So Serviceable, So Obedient; At Others, So Bewildered And So Weak; And At Others Again, So Tyrannic, So Beyond Control! We Are, To Be Sure, A Miracle Every Way; But Our Powers Of Recollecting And Of Forgetting Do Seem Peculiarly Past Finding Out.

She Was Convinced That She Could Have Been Happy With Him, When It Was No Longer Likely They Should Meet.

I Am Not Born To Sit Still And Do Nothing. If I Lose The Game, It Shall Not Be From Not Striving For It.

She Tried To Be Calm, And Leave Things To Take Their Course; And Tried To Dwell Much On This Argument Of Rational Dependence – “surely, If There Be Constant Attachment On Each Side, Our Hearts Must Understand Each Other Ere Long. We Are Not Boy And Girl, To Be Captiously Irritable, Misled By Every Moment’s Inadvertence, And Wantonly Playing With Our Own Happiness.” And Yet, A Few Minutes Afterwards, She Felt As If Their Being In Company With Each Other, Under Their Present Circumstances, Could Only Be Exposing Them To Inadvertencies And Misconstructions Of The Most Mischievous Kind.