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[Postmark: July 18, 1846]

It is out of time to-night to write to you, since to-morrow
we are to meet but the letter which did not reach you,
has been recoiling on me all day. Perhaps you have it by
this time . . an uncomfortable letter, better away from
you, notwithstanding all the kindness you speak, about my
silence and the effect of that. So I write just a few words
The post office was in fault as usual. May it do perfecter
duty to-morrow.

Saturday ! our day ! At least if anything should be
against it, you shall hear at the door by a note, when you
come at three o’clock. I have put away my Thursday
night’s melancholy . . except the repentance of troubling
you with it understand that I have !

Mrs. Jameson was here to-day, and her niece, . . and
you, never named, but she is coming another day, she says,
to pay me a longer visit. I like her . . I like her. Then,
there came another visitor, . . my uncle Hedley, who
began, as usual, to talk of Italy he advises me to go this
year. ‘ If you don’t go this year, you never will go . .
and you ought at once to make an effort, and go.’ We
talked of places and of ways, and after he had said many
words in favour of Pisa, desired, if I went through Paris,
that I would pay him a visit. ‘ Ah,’ said I, ‘ uncle
Hedley, you are very good to me always, but when that
day arrives, you may be inclined, perhaps, to cast me off,’
‘ Cast you off, Ba,’ he cried in the most puzzled astonish-
ment ‘ why what can you mean ? what words to use !
Cast you off ! now do explain what you mean.’ ‘ Ah, no
one can tell,’ said I musingly. ‘Do you mean,’ he
insisted, ‘ because you will be a rebel and a runaway ? ‘ . .
(laughing !) ‘ no, no I won’t cast you off, I promise you !
Only I hope that you may be able to manage it quietly ‘
&c. &c.

He is a most amiable man, so gentle and tender ; and
fond of me ; exclusively of the poetry. I am certain that
he never can make out how anyone in the world can
consent to read my verses. But Ba, as Ba, is a decided
favourite of his, beyond all in the house not that he is a
real uncle . . only the husband of my aunt, and caring
more for me than both my real uncles, who, each of them,
much prefer a glass of claret, thank you ! The very
comparison does me too much honour for either of them.
Claret is a holy thing. If I had said half a glass, and
mixed it with water, I should have been more accurate by
so much.

Now, dearest, dearest, I say good-night and have done.
I am wholly yours and always.

[Postmark: July 17, 1846]

Did you ever see a more uncongenial, colourless day than
this that brings me no letter ! I do not despair yet, how-
ever there will be a post presently. When I am without
the sight of you, and the voice of you, which a letter seems . .
I feel very accurately the justice of that figure by which I am
represented as ‘ able to leave you alone leaving you and
following my pleasure elsewhere ‘ so you have written and
spoken ! Well, to-day, I may follow my pleasures.

I will follow you, Ba, the thoughts of you, and long for
to-morrow.

No letter for me, the time is past. If you are well, my
own Ba, I will not mind . . more than I can. You had not
been out for two days the wind is high, too. May God
keep you at all times, ever dearest !

The sun shines again now I will hope to hear at six
o’clock.

I can tell you nothing better, I think, than this I heard
from Moxon the other day . . it really ought to be remem-
bered. Moxon was speaking of critics, the badness of their
pay, how many pounds a column the Times allowed, and
shillings the Athenaeum, and of the inevitable effects on
the performances of the poor fellows. ‘ How should they
be at the trouble of reading any difficult book so as to review
it, Landor, for instance?’ and indeed a friend of my own
has promised to write a notice in the Times but he com-
plains bitterly, he shall have to read the book, he can do
no less, and all for five or ten pounds’ ! All which
Moxon quite seemed to understand ‘ it will really take him
some three or four mornings to read enough of Landor to
be able to do anything effectually.’ I asked if there had
been any notices of the Book already ‘ Just so many,’ he
said ‘ as Forster had the power of getting done ‘- Mr.
White, a clergyman, has written a play for Macready, which
everybody describes as the poorest stuff imaginable, it is
immediately reviewed in Blackwood and the Edinburgh
‘ Because ‘ continues M, ‘he is a Blackwood reviewer, and
may do the like good turn to any of the confraternity.’

So here I will end, wanting to come to the kissing
dearest Ba, and bidding her remember to-morrow how my
heart sinks to-day in the silence.

Ever, dearest dearest, your very own.

[Postmark: July 17, 1846]

Thursday.

Dearest, if you feel that, must I not feel it more deeply ?
Twice or three times lately he has said to me ‘ my love ‘
and even ‘ my puss,’ his old words before he was angry
last year, . . and I quite quailed before them as if they were
so many knife-strokes. Anything but his kindness, I can
bear now.

Yet I am glad that you feel that . . The difficulty,
(almost the despair !) has been with me, to make you understand the two ends of truth . . both that he is not stone . .
and that he is immovable as stone. Perhaps only a very
peculiar nature could have held so long the position he
holds in his family. His hand would not lie so heavily,
without a pulse in it. Then he is upright faithful to
his conscience. You would respect him, . . and love him
perhaps in the end. For me, he might have been king and
father over me to the end, if he had thought it worth while
to love me openly enough yet, even so, he should not
have let you come too near. And you could not (so) have
come too near for he would have had my confidence from
the beginning, and no opportunity would have been permitted to you of proving your affection for me, and I should
have thought always what I thought at first. So the nightshade and the eglantine are twisted, twined, one in the
other, . . and the little pink roses lean up against the pale
poison of the berries — we cannot tear this from that, let us
think of it ever so much !

We must be humble and beseeching afterwards at least,
and try to get forgiven — Poor Papa ! I have turned it
over and over in my mind, whether it would be less offensive, less shocking to him, if an application were made first.
If I were strong, I think I should incline to it at all risks
but as it is, . . it might . . would, probably, . . take away the
power of action from me altogether. We should be separated, you see, from that moment, . . hindered from writing . .
hindered from meeting . . and I could evade nothing, as I
am not to say that I should have fainting fits at every
lifting of his voice, through that inconvenient nervous
temperament of mine which has so often made me ashamed
of myself. Then . . the positive disobedience might be a
greater offence than the unauthorised act. I shut my eyes
in terror sometimes. May God direct us to the best.

Oh — do not write about this, dearest, dearest? — I
throw myself out of it into the pure, sweet, deep thought of
you . . which is the love of you always. I am yours . . your
own. I never doubt of being yours. I feel too much
yours. It is might and right together. You are more to
me, beside, than the whole world.

Write nothing of this, dearest of all ! — it is of no use.
To-day . . this morning . . I went out in the carriage, and
we drove round the Park ; and Mrs. Jameson did not come
afterward. Will she put it off till Saturday ? I have heard
nothing against Saturday, by the way, worse than that con-
jecture of mine.

And I have written you, perhaps, a teazing, painful
letter . . I, who love you to-day ‘ as much as ever.’ It is
my destiny, I sometimes think, to torment you. And let
me say what I will, remember how nothing that I say can
mean a doubt you never shall have reason to reproach me
for the falseness of cowardice that double falseness . .
both to me and to you. Only I wish this were Christmas day, and we … even at Salerno . . in the ‘ bad air ‘ ! There’s
no harm in such a wish now is there ?

Ever and ever I am your own

BA.

[Postmark: July 16, 1846]

Thursday.

I should be doing your own dear face (which I see so perfectly through the distance) — too great a wrong if I so much
as answered the charge of ‘ not remembering.’ I see the
face smile above the hand that writes ! As if one may not
say that a division, a wound, smarts more on the first day,
and aches more on the next ! As if I do not prefer the
fresh sharp regret to the settling of . . what I trust in God
and you I never shall feel ! However, if it will please you
to know, I do feel to-day as earnest a longing to be with
you again as if your two letters were not here, — as if
Tuesday lay only an hour behind instead of the two
long days !

I think your Father’s words on those two occasions,
very kind, — very ! They confuse, — perhaps humble me . .
that is not the expression, but it may stay. I dare say he
is infinitely kind at bottom — I think so, that is, on my own
account, — because, come what will or may, I shall never
see otherwise than with your sight. If he could know me,
I think he would soon reconcile himself to all of it, — know
my heart’s purposes toward you. But that is impossible —
and with the sincere will to please him by any exertion or
sacrifice in my power, I shall very likely never have the
opportunity of picking up a glove he might drop. In old
novels, the implacable father is not seldom set upon by a
round dozen of ruffians with blacked faces from behind a
hedge, and just as the odds prove too many, suddenly a
stranger (to all save the reader) leaps over an adjacent ditch,
&c. ‘ Sir, under Providence, I owe you my life ! ‘ &c. &c.
How does Dumas improve on this in ‘ Monte Cristo ‘ — are
there ‘ new effects ? ‘ Absurdity ! Yet I would fain . .
fain ! you understand.

To talk about my ‘ spoiling you for other conversers ‘
is . . oh, leap over hedge and ditch, somebody, to the
rescue ! If I praise myself for anything in our intimacy it
is that I never . . but I won’t go into it. And putting my
own experience aside and in its place, it strikes me that
what Ba ranks as a ‘ third-rate man ‘ may pass justly for a
paragon and marvel among men as the world has a right to
class them. I am quite sure if I had been present and
much had uttered itself about mullions . . somebody would
have looked a very babe in knowledge, and perhaps made
Ba blush for him and her own waste of love and praise —
So he retreats where he may keep it all in virtue of being
what he is ever is, and shall be, her own R.

The river-voyage is not only the cheaper but by far the
more interesting . . all to consider is the fatigue to you ;
what else ?

I am very well to-day. Rachel’s ‘ Phedre ‘ was admirable
last night ; quite through Racine up to Euripides the
declaration-scene with Hippolytus exquisite . . I must
tell you —

[Postmark: July 15, 1846]

Wednesday Evening.

Well ! I anticipated your asking, I think, and told you
fully this morning. It was a chronicle I sent you, rather
than a letter. And nothing is left to tell you for I did
not go out all day . . nor yesterday. Which was wrong.
But I had visitor on visitor to-day, . . my old maid coming
to bring me her baby to look at, to Flush’s infinite delight.
Whenever she comes he devotes hmself to her, stays with
her down-stairs, lies on the corner of her gown, and, for the
most part, forbears going to sleep. To-morrow I mean to
go out . . to-morrow, when you are beginning to think
rather less of me.

Isn’t it ungrateful of me ? I think so.

I am glad, at least, that I do not appear to you ‘ sus-
picious.’ Because I dislike suspicious people myself, and
it has struck me often in the midst of the dislike . . ‘ That
is how I must appear to him.’ Ah but you are too
indulgent to me, my own dearest . . too dearest ! . . .
and you draw crooked inferences for me, shutting both the
eyes . . the near-sighted eye and far-sighted eye. Or is it,
in that strange sight of yours, that I walk between the far
and the near objects, in an invisible security ? Or is it
(which were best) that I am too near to be seen even by
the near-sighted eye, . . like a hand brought close to the
eyelashes, which, for over-closeness, nobody can see ? Let
me be too near to be seen always too near ! dearest,
dearest ! Never will I complain that you do not see me !
Be sure of that, now.

Once I used to be more uneasy, and to think that I
ought to make you see me. But Love is better than Sight,
and Love will do without Sight. Which I did not under-
stand at first. I knew it was enough for me, that you
should love me. That it was enough for you, I had to learn
afterwards.

And ‘ Grateful ‘ is my word and not yours. I am
grateful to you, if to owe you all the sense of life, all the
renewal of hope, all the possibility of happiness . . if to
owe these things to another, consciously, feelingly, shall
pass for gratitude, . . then I am grateful to you, Robert.

Do you not know it, that I should say it again ? For me,
it seems to me that I can do nothing in return. To love
you ! Why no woman in the world could do less.

I am glad, both for the public and Tennyson, that his
poems sell so well and presently you will do as well or
better and I, half as well perhaps ; so that we shall be
too rich, which will spoil it all . . won’t it ?

Mr. Horne sent me the Daily News to-day, . . the
number containing his verses on Haydon . . and I cut
from it an advertisement, for the purpose of bidding you
observe that the land journey, or river-voyage, is very much
cheaper than the sea-voyage by the steamers unless the
direct vessel to Leghorn should go as last year, and I fear
it will not. The steamer-charges of the Oriental company
are immense. Nineteen guineas to Gibraltar even !
Twenty-eight, I think, to Naples. As for the advertisement,
I send it only for what it suggests. And there is time
enough for calculations, all ways suggestible.

May God bless you, dear, dear ! How is the head ?
Shall it be better, without me, until Saturday ? Say how
it is.

Among all my visitors, the only one I expected, never
came ! No Mrs. Jameson again to-day !

Dearest, I am your very own

BA.

[Postmark: July 15, 1846]

Wednesday.

Dearest Ba, I am anxious to know what cannot yet be
told me, how that unforeseen visit has worked tell me the
moment you can, and fully, whatever happens.

‘ Suspicious ‘ anything in the world rather than that,
you are ! When you have mistrusted your own power over
me, I believed always in the mistrust . . which, indeed,
matters little except to yourself. For if I would, certainly,
have the truth seen as the truth, and our true position
understood, yet . . there is, ought I not to be ashamed
at saying ? an exquisite, final grace and endearingness in
the ignorance, strange as I must account it. You doubly
trust me, with the treasure, and then, with the knowledge
that it is a treasure, or such a treasure.

Ba, when I think of it all, my whole heart becomes one
gratitude to you, I am only yours, grateful for ever. It is
the only kind of thoughts in which you shall not share
(there are many in which you cannot) the thoughts to my
inmost self as I go over what you say and do and try to
clear up to myself the precise fascination in each : you shall
not know what you do . . but shall continue to do and to
let me know. I love you entirely. Where can you change
so that I shall not love you more and more as I grow more
able and worthier ? I cannot sit for twenty-four hours by
you as I sit for three as it is, I take myself to task for not
doing something here at home to justify in some measure
my privilege and blessing and the only thing that keeps
conscience quiet comparatively is . . the old expedient
that the Future engages to do for me what the Present
cannot. Under your eyes, I will hope to work and attain
your approval. I know that when you were only the great
Poet and not my Ba, I would have preferred your praise, as
competent to praise, to that of the whole world I
remember distinctly, and know I should have done so.

And now, if I put aside the Poet and only (what an ‘ only ‘)
see my dearest, dearest lady of that hair and eyes, and
hands, and voice, and all the completeness that was trusted
to my arms yesterday why I feel that if she, never having
written a line, said ‘ What Miss Barrett may think I do
not know, but I am content with what you show me ‘ then,
dearest, should not I be content ?

I called on Moxon and called at Carlyle’s to no pur-
pose. He was out, and will leave town (said the servant)
next Saturday. Mrs. Carlyle has already left it. So, no
Rag Fair for the present, or probably ever ! This was my
fault, I having let several Sundays go by I must write to
Mr. Kenyon and try if he will come on his own account.
Moxon tells me that he has sold fifteen hundred of Tenny-
son’s Poems in a year and is about to print another
edition in consequence. If that is the case, and Tennyson
gets, say, only half a crown by the sale of each copy,
expenses deducted, he will have received 178/., little
enough, as payments are made to Punch-literature, but
enough to live upon, whatever the awful fiat decides !
Tennyson ‘is going’ to Switzerland presently with Moxon
but is liable to fits of indecision. He did talk of going to
Italy (of course), but the other day, time being up, his
brother was forced to proceed alone. Moxon is coming
here first.

Now I will kiss you, dearest, and hope that Wimpole
Street stands where it did, unhurt by explosions of any-
kind. I have got a letter from Procter asking me to go to-
day, which I cannot do. Ever your own, very own R.

[Postmark: July 15, 1846]

Wednesday Morning.

And is it true of to-day as you said it would be, ever
dearest, that you wish to be with me? Let me have the
comfort, or luxury rather, of the thought of it, before to-
morrow takes you a step farther off.

At dinner my aunt said to Papa.. ‘I have not seen
Ba all day and when I went to her room, to my astonish-
ment a gentleman was sitting there.’ ‘Who was that?’ said
Papa’s eyes to Arabel ‘Mr. Browning called here to-day,’
she answered ‘And Ba bowed her head,’ continued my
aunt, ‘as if she meant to signify to me that I was not to
come in’- ‘ Oh,’ cried Henrietta, ‘that must have been
a mistake of yours. Perhaps she meant just the contrary.’
‘You should have gone in,’ Papa said, ‘and seen the poet.’
Now if she really were to do that the next time! Yet I
did not, you know, make the expelling gesture she thought
she saw. Simply I was startled. As to Saturday we must
try whether we cannot defend the position.. set the
guns against the approaches to right and left.. we must
try.

In speaking too of your visit this morning, Stormy
said to her.. ‘Oh Mr. Browning is a great friend of
Ba’s! He comes here twice a week is it twice a week or
once, Arabel?’

While I write, the Hedleys come and Mrs. Hedley is
beseeching me into seeing Mr. Bevan, whom perhaps I must
see, notwithstanding Flush’s wrongs.

By the way, I made quite clear to Flush that you
left the cakes, and they were very graciously received
indeed.

Dearest, since the last word was written, Mrs. Hedley
came back leading Mr. Bevan, and Papa who had just
entered the room found the door shut upon him.. I was

nervous.. oh, so nervous! and the six feet, and some-
thing more, of Mr. Bevan seemed to me as if they never
would end, so tall the man is. Well and he sate down
by me according to my aunt’s arrangement; and I, who
began to talk a thousand miles from any such subject, with
a good reason for the precaution, found myself thrown
head-foremost into ecclesiastical architecture at the close of
about three minutes how he got there all his saints know
best! It’s his subject.. par excellence. He talks to
Arabella about arches and mullions he can’t talk of any-
thing else, I suspect. And because the Trinity is ex-
pressed in such a form of church-building, the altar at the
east, and the baptistery at the door, .. there’s no other
lawful form of a church, none at all! Not that he has an
opinion! he ‘adopts opinions,’ but would not think for
himself for the world at the risk of ultimate damnation!
Which was the amount of his talk to-day.. and really it
does not strike me as wisdom, now that I set it down so.
Yet the man expressed himself well and has a sensible face
he is a clever third-class man, I think better than the
mass for sense, but commonplace essentially. Only,
inasmuch as ecclesiastical architecture is not my subject,
I may think otherwise of him when I know him otherwise.
I do not dislike him now. And then I am conscious how
you spoil me for common men, dearest! It is scarcely fair
on them.

My aunt (Mrs. Hedley) said when she introduced him:
‘You are to understand this to be a great honour for
she never lets anybody come here except Mr. Kenyon, ..
and a few other gentlemen’… (laughing). Said Papa
‘Only one other gentleman, indeed. Only Mr. Browning,
the poet the man of the pomegranates.’ Was that likely
to calm me, do you think? How late it is I must break
off. To-night I shall write again. Dearest beloved,

I am your own always.

[Postmark: July 14, 1846]

Monday Morning.

I must write.. even if you come to-morrow. Dearest,
if I told you all that nonsense on Saturday, it was for the
sake of telling you all and of hearing you say ‘What
nonsense’ afterwards. I never began by disguising any-
thing from you.. did I? I always wished you to see
how the arrows would strike out at us from that bush and
this bush. At us. For, granting that you seriously
thought it possible for such motives to divide me from
you, … ah, granting it, .. and you may well ask my
pardon!

The world! the world could as soon catch me with a
‘line’ so baited, as you could catch a trout with a silver
sixpence at the end of a string. Not only do I think with
you entirely on that subject, but I always thought like
you. Always I have hated all their worldly systems, and
not merely now, and since I have loved you. With a
hundred a year between us, I would have married you, if
you had not been afraid. And so, think whether directly
or ‘indirectly’ I am likely to be frightened into the breach
of an engagement by what I repeated to you or by what is
like unto it. No my weaknesses are of a different class
altogether.

The talk I talked over again to you, seemed to burn in
my ears the longer on that Saturday, because, while it was
being originally talked between Papa and my aunt (touch-
ing Arabella Hedley’s marriage), he had brought a paper
for me to sign about some money placed on a railway, (not
speculatively).. and my aunt, by way of saying a lively
thing, exclaimed, ‘Is that your marriage-settlement, my
dear?’.. which made me so nervous that I wrote my
name wrong and vexed Papa into being almost cross with
me. So one word got entwined with another, and all
seemed to hang around me Do you understand?

But you do not, how you pained me when you said that.
Ah-I thought I saw you gone.. ‘so far, so far,’ as you
said.. and myself left.

Yet I should deserve it of course, if I were to give you
up for the sake of that! .. or for any other motive, ..
except your advantage.. your own. I should deserve
everything in such a case, but should feel nothing..
not even my punishment. Could I? .. being without a
heart?

Ah-after all my mistrust, did I ever mistrust you so?
I have doubted your power to love me as you believed you
loved me, perhaps but your will to be true to one you
loved, without reference to worldly influences, I never
doubted, nor could. I think I will let you beg my pardon;
you unjust, dearest..

To so much over-praise, there should be a little wrong-
ing, too.. and therefore you are not, after all, ‘unjust’
.. only ‘dearest’!….

Such a letter, besides, you have written, .. and there
are two of them to-day! You will not go from me, I
think, ‘so far, so far.’ You will not leave me behind,
with the harpoon in me, to make red the salt wilderness of
waters.

Altogether, then, I forgive you, Robert and it is
glorious for me to have something to forgive you for,
who are the best so out of measure! I seize the
opportunity.

And you come to-morrow ! Which is right.. right!
I was afraid that you would not come And Mrs.
Jameson is perfectly uncertain as you may read in this new
note which reached me with yours to-night.

All the Hedleys have dined here. To-morrow will be
clear of them.. pure of them, I was going to write..
but I thought of Mrs. Hedley’s beaming affectionate face..
(so still lovely, she looked this evening, when she came
up-stairs to kiss me!).. and could not say such a wronging
word. You would like her you could not help it.

I was in the carriage to-day in Oxford Street.. and a
sealed letter was thrown exactly at my head, my aunt and
cousin and Henrietta being with me a sealed letter sealed
with arms (not of Agincourt!) and directed ‘For your
perusal.’ Guess the meaning of that! why just a tract by
the Rev. Villiers of that parish, upon the enormous wicked-
ness of frequenting plays and balls! Perhaps I looked
as if my soul had entered into the secret of the Polka-
dancers!-who can say?

So, good-night, dearest dearest!

I cannot give myself again to you,

being your own.

Of course this was written with the poker, as you will
see by the calligraphy.

[Postmark: July 13, 1846]

Monday.

My own Ba, your letter kisses me in its entire kindness – and I kiss it and you. – Mrs. Jameson may come or keep away . . (since you let me speak and decide, which is like you) . . she may appoint and reappoint, but Tuesday was given me and I will have it if her visit is the only obstacle – for what was all the confessing worth if not to account for such a phenomenon as my presence in your room when by any chance she might discover it? Beside, as you say, she is the most uncertain of engagement-holders . . no, indeed, – no Tuesday ought to be given up for her! Therefore, unless fresh orders arrive, – at three on Tuesday . . which is happily, happily to-morrow ! You are my own sweetest to reach a letter to me with your own hand, as you tell me, – and the drive, and the walk to the Post Office – thank you, Ba! Perhaps . . dare I say . . you will answer that letter I sent yesterday . . because now I remember there is no prayer at the end to prevent you . . that is, from answering the main part of it the reverting &c.

I wrote to Mr. Home, but shall not hear from him – on Saturday I wrote. And Mr. Bennett’s two letters are considerately written, – directed, – I mean, in a hand and with a blue ink that I recognise, – consequently the contents give me no trouble. I wrote two or three lines to the ‘year of the world’ poet, did you take the pains? Once on a time some unknown author sent me a Tragedy, ‘not published,’ called ‘Alessandro de’ Medici,’ with some striking scenes . . I wonder who could be the writer did it ever fall in your way ?

. . As if I care! – can I care about anything that is not Ba? All else seems as idle as . . as, – now you shall have a real instance in point – as my dream last night. This morning at breakfast my mother asked me, the first thing, what could so amuse me as to make me call loudly ‘Bravo’ again and again, with abundance of laughter? (My room is next to hers and the door is left ajar). Whereupon I tried to recall my dream – and all that I can seize is a passage through a gallery of Haydoffs pictures, one of which was a portrait of his wife; nor did a suspicion once cross my mind that the artist was not well and working somewhere in the vicinity all the time – How strange! I never dream if quite well – and I suppose the present state of my head just amounts to not being quite well. (It is better at any rate, and to-morrow – ought to be worse, that – Ba may prove her potency as of old).

Now I will kiss you and wait as well as I can till the full blessing. Dearest – dearest I am your own.

[Postmark: July 13, 1846]

Sunday. 6 P.M.

Ever, ever dearest, I have to feel for you all through Sunday, and I hear no sound and see no light. How are you? how did you get home yesterday? I thought of you more than usual after you went, if I did not love you as much as usual . . . What could that doubt have been made of?

Dearest, I had a letter last night from Mrs. Jameson, who says that on Tuesday or Wednesday at about four o’clock (though she is as little sure of the hour apparently as of the day), she means to come to see me. Now you are to consider whether this grand peutêtre will shake our Tuesday, . . whether you would rather take Thursday instead, or will run the risk as it appears. I am ready to agree, either way. She is the most uncertain of uncertain people, and may not come at all . . it’s a case for what Hume used to call sceptical scepticism. Judge! Then I have heard (I forgot to tell you) from Mr. Home – and . . did you have two letters last week from your Bennet? . . because I had, – flying leaves of ‘Mignonette,’ and other lyrical flowers.

When you had gone Arabel came to persuade me to go to the park in a cab, notwithstanding my too lively recollections of the last we chanced upon, – and I was persuaded, and so we tumbled one over another (yet not all those cabs are so rough!) to the nearest gate opening on the grass, and got out and walked a little. A lovely evening it was, but I wished somehow rather to be at home, and Flush had his foot pinched in shutting the cab-door, . . and altogether there was not much gain: – only, as for Flush’s foot, though he cried piteously and held it up, looking straight to me for sympathy, no sooner had he touched the grass than he began to run without a thought of it. Flush always makes the most of his misfortunes – he is of the Byronic school – il se pose en victime.

Now I will not write any more – I long to have my letter of to-morrow morning – I long to have it . . Shall I not have it to-morrow morning? This is posted by my hand.

I loved you yesterday . . I love you to-day . . I shall love you to-morrow.

Every day I am yours.

BA.