Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/86

74 I was residing in Italy with my two sons; occupied in completing a work to be published by Messrs Hurst and Blackett, the profits of which were devoted to the Oxford expenses of the youngest. I had just nursed him through one of those tedious Neapolitan fevers, from which he had suffered for nine weeks,—I had myself been confined to my room for five weeks,—and this was the time chosen by Mr Norton, as husband and father, for a vain battling correspondence, compelling my return to England, to debate at law the contract I thought had been settled for life. This was the time chosen,—by subpœnaing my publishers, and claiming to reckon my literary gains as his own personal relief,—to establish his legal right to annul even the service I could render my son: and to revive libels he himself had a thousand times admitted to be false: by which he once more put me in the same position, as to the repelling of accusation, that I had been in when our separation took place, in 1836.

In the same position, only as to that one point. Lord Melbourne is dead; my children are grown up; I have no second youth, to wear away in the fond hope of "living down" Mr Norton's slanders, and making friendships and companionships among my own sex without the sorrowful embarrassment of a "story" to explain. I have no second youth, I say, to spend in a semi-justification against these foul slanders. Therefore, once for all, I deny them: I defy them: I disprove them: and I regret only that I did not do, years ago, that which I do this day. As to writing, I will never again write, while my copyrights are held to be Mr Norton's; except on this single subject of the state of the Laws of Protection for Women. My youth has gone by in struggle and vexation; much of it in bitter sorrow: the youth of other women may be saved from such