Idle inquiry...

Let's read some old musty letters :

I, therefore, as I feel now so ill and perpetual nervous distress, feel that perhaps I may be adding to yours by a silence which I have kept on John Ruskin's conduct to me ever since I left your care, although I have lately and on my last visit home shown you how very unhappy I was...

I have therefore simply to tell you that I do not think I am John Ruskin's wife at all -- and I entreat you to assist me to get released from the unnatural position in which I stand to him.

To go back to the day of my marriage I went as you know away to the Highlands. I had never been told the duties of married persons to each other and knew little or nothing about their relations in the closest union on earth. For days John talked about this relation to me but avowed no intention of making me his Wife. He alleged various reasons, hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year told me his true reason (and this to me is as villainous as all the rest) that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening...

Then he said he would marry me when I was twenty five. This last year we spoke about it, I did say what I thought in May -- he then said as I professed quite a dislike to him it would be SINFUL to enter into such a connection, as if I was not very wicked I was at least insane and the responsibility that I might have children was too great, as I was quite unfit to bring them up. These are some of the facts. You may imagine what I have gone through -- besides all this the temptations his neglect threw in the way of me. If only he had been kind, I might have lived and died in my maiden state, but in addition to his brutality his leaving me on every occasion -- His threats for the future of a wish to break my spirit...

I don't think, poor creature, he knows anything about human creatures -- but he is so gifted otherwise and so cold at the same time that he never thinks of people's feelings and yet with his eloquence will always command admiration.

Says a pretty 20year old to her father.

I married like a fool, because a girl's face pleased me. She married me for my money, breaking her faith to a poor lover.

Says Ruskin (and further he says old George, the father in question, was bankrupt ; and other things).

All this is of little interest, the girl went on to marry some other guy ; the guy claimed "incurable impotence" and went on to not marry some nine year old girl who died of unclear causes (anorexia-heartburn-dementia-whatever) two decades laterⁱ, whatever period nonsense.

The question however is, what did the pedophile find he didn't exactly expect ?

Was the adult woman's snatch too hairy ?! Too leaky ? Were her lips too large, was the pigmentation distressingly maroon ? Did she have a remarkably large clit ? Or maybe zits, unutterably purulent infections form the poor hygiene not inconceivable at a time (especially in a girl that "had never been told the duties of married persons to each other") ? What, what was it exactly ?

You have my ear, go ahead...

1. The whole thing's featured massively in Nabokov's wankfest. [↩]