"
The first wife of Mr. Stowe was her most intimate friend, and his
suffering at her death moved her to intense pity, which finally
ripened into love. At the last moment of her maidenhood she wrote
again to Georgiana May: "In about half an hour more your old friend,
companion, schoolmate, sister, etc., will cease to be Hatty Beecher
and change to nobody knows who. My dear, you are engaged and pledged
in a year or two to encounter a similar fate, and do you wish to know
how you shall feel? Well, my dear, I have been dreading and dreading
the time, and lying awake all last week wondering how I should live
through this overwhelming crisis, and lo! it has come and I feel
_nothing at all_."
Her marriage with Professor Stowe was a congenial one. He discovered
very early what her career must be and wrote to her once during a
brief absence: "God has written it in his book that you must be a
literary woman, and who are we that we should contend against God?"
His admiration for her was perfect, a feeling which she reciprocated
in a somewhat different form. "I did not know," she once wrote to him,
"until I came away how much I was dependent upon you for information.
There are a thousand favorite subjects on which I could talk with you
better than with any one else. If you were not already my dearly loved
husband, I should certainly fall in love with you."
She can speak to him with an openness which she uses to no one else;
she says, and in this sentence she gives the secret of much which has
appeared inexplicable to the world: "One thing more in regard to
myself.
Pages:
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147