He gives one full time to reflect, that must be admitted.

However, I will not blame him unheard, nor permit myself to doubt the manly firmness of a character which I have so often extolled to you.

Were he capable of doubt, of fear, of the shadow of change, I should have little to regret.
'And why, you will say, when I expect such steady and unalterable constancy from a lover, why should I be anxious about what Hazlewood does, or to whom he offers his attentions?
I ask myself the question a hundred times a day, and it only receives the very silly answer that one does not like to be neglected, though one would not encourage a serious infidelity.
'I write all these trifles because you say that they amuse you, and yet I wonder how they should.

I remember, in our stolen voyages to the world of fiction, you always admired the grand and the romantic,--tales of knights, dwarfs, giants, and distressed damsels, oothsayers, visions, beckoning ghosts, and bloody hands; whereas I was partial to the involved intrigues of private life, or at farthest to so much only of the supernatural as is conferred by the agency of an Eastern genie or a beneficent fairy.

YOU would have loved to shape your course of life over the broad ocean, with its dead calms and howling tempests, its tornadoes, and its billows mountain-high; whereas I should like to trim my little pinnace to a brisk breeze in some inland lake or tranquil bay, where there was just difficulty of navigation sufficient to give interest and to require skill without any sensible degree of danger.