My dearest Life and Love:

You have hurt me, I know not how much, by the insinuation in your last, that my letters to you have lately been less frequent, because I have felt less concern for you.  The suspicion is most unjust – may I not add, it is most unkind!  Have we lived, now almost a score of years, in the closest and dearest conjugal intimacy to so little purpose that, on an appearance only of inattention to you, and which you might have accounted for in a thousand ways more natural and more probable, you should pitch upon that single motive which alone in injurious to me?  I have not, I own, wrote so often to you as I wished, and as I ought.  But think of my frustration and then ask your heart, if I be without excuse.  We are not, my dearest, in circumstances the most favorable to our happiness; but let us not, I beseech you, idly make them worse, by indulging suspicions and apprehensions which minds in distress are but too apt to give way to.  I never was, as you have often told me, even in my better and more disengaged days, so attentive to the little punctilies of friendship, as, it may be, became me: but, my heart tells me, there never was a moment in my life since I first knew you, in which it did not cleave and cling to you with the warmest affection: and it must cease to beat, ere it can cease to wish for your happiness, above anything on earth!…the perpetual solicitude of your poor heart about me, is certainly highly flattering to me; yet I should be happy to be able to quiet your fears…I beg to be affectionately remembered to all our fiends and relations; and that you will continue to believe me to be your most faithful and tender Husband,
G.W.