stines, have shown me more sympathy and friendship in my loss than I could expect." Marx was evidently much touched, and wrote apologising for his seeming coldness. It was not due to want of feeling at Engels' loss, which he had been terribly upset about, but when Engels' letter came, the brokers were actually in the house, the various tradesmen were clamouring for payment, there was no food in the house, and his daughter, Jenny, was ill. As a consequence, he was almost mad with anxiety, could not work, and did not know where and to whom to turn.
But Engels was quick to forgive—he answered immediately: "I thank you for your sincerity. You can understand yourself the impression made on me by your previous letter. One cannot live with a woman for so long without being frightfully upset by her death. I felt that with her I was burying the last remains of my youth. When I received your letter she was not yet in her grave. I tell you that your letter was in my head the whole week; I could not forget it. Never mind, your last letter has made up for it, and I am glad that I have not lost, together with Mary, my oldest and best friend." He then goes on to outline a plan of saving Marx from his immediate pecuniary anxieties.
Marx replies in the same tone. "I can tell you now without further formalities, that in spite of all the strain I have gone through these last few weeks, nothing weighed on me anywhere near so much as the fear of a break in our friendship. I have repeatedly declared to my wife that the whole wretched business is as nothing to me, compared with the fact that these bourgeois worries and their consequent agitation should have made me capable instead of consoling you at such a moment, to worry you with my private difficulties."
Towards the end of 1864, Engels married Lizzy, the sister of Mary Burns. They lived very happily together until her death in 1878. Mrs. Engels was a highly intelligent woman, who shared her husband's ideals and was an enthusiastic Fenian to the end of her life. They had no children, but Mrs. Engels' niece, Mary Ellen, nicknamed Pumps, lived with them and was educated and treated by both as their own daughter.
An End to "Sweet Commerce"
Towards the end of 1868 we find Engels concerned with the ending of his partnership in the cotton business, and it proves what a good man of business he must have been that his partner, Ermen, was willing to buy him out with a large sum of money in return for Engels binding himself not to open up a business in the same trade on his own account (a thing Engels would, in any case, not have dreamt of doing, as we have seen above).
However, Engels' one concern was that he should have enough to support Marx adequately, and as the sum offered him by Ermen would be sufficient to enable him to give Marx a regular £350 a year,
