I am not complaining or despairing, but facts are stern realities.

The twain become one flesh, the woman, "we"; henceforth she has no separate work, and how soon the last standing monuments (yourself and myself, Lydia), will lay down the individual "shovel and de hoe" and with proper zeal and spirit grasp those of some masculine hand, the mercies and the spirits only know.

I declare to you that I distrust the power of any woman, even of myself, to withstand the mighty matrimonial maelstrom! But how did I get into this dissertation?
If to you it seems morbid, pardon the pen-wandering.

In the depths of my soul there is a continual denial of the self-annihilating spiritual or legal union of two human beings.

Such union, in the very nature of things, must bring an end to the free action of one or the other, and it matters not to the individual whose freedom has thus departed whether it be the gentle rule of love or the iron hand of law which blotted out from the immortal being the individual soul-stamp of the Good Father.