My love to England.  Is it showing much autumn yet?  My eyes long for green fields again.  Since I have been in Italy I had not seen one until the other day from the top of St. Giorgio Maggiore, where one lies in hiding under the monastery walls.

All that I see now quickens me to fresh thoughts of you.  Yet do not expect me to come back wiser:  my last effort at wisdom was to fall in love with you, and there I stopped for good and all.  There I am still, everything included:  what do you want more?  My letter and my heart both threaten to be over-weight, so no more of them this time.  Most dearly do I love you.

LETTER XL.

Beloved:  If two days slip by, I don’t know where I am when I come to write; things get so crowded in such a short space of time.  Where I left off I know not:  I will begin where I am most awake—­your letter which I have just received.

That is well, dearest, that is well indeed:  a truce till February!  And since the struggle then must needs be a sharp one—­with only one end, as we know,—­do not vex her now by any overt signs of preparation as if you assumed already that her final arguments were to be as so much chaff before the wind.  You do not tell me what she argues, and I do not ask.  She does not say I shall not love you enough!

To answer businesslike to your questions first:  with your forgiveness we stay here till the 25th, and get back to England with the last of the month.  Does that seem a very cruel, far-off date?  Others have the wish to stay even longer, and it would be no fairness to hurry them beyond a certain degree of reasonableness with my particular reason for impatience, seeing, moreover, that in your love I have every help for remaining patient.  It is too much to hope, I suppose, that the “truce” sets you free now, and that you could meet us here after all, and prolong our stay indefinitely?  I know one besides myself who would be glad, and would welcome an outside excuse dearly.

For, oh, the funniness of near and dear things!  Arthur’s heart is laid up with a small love affair, and it is the comicalest of internal maladies.  He is screwing up courage to tell me all about it, and I write in haste before my mouth is sealed by his confidences.  I fancy I know the party, an energetic little mortal whom we met at Lucerne, where Arthur lingered while we came on to Florence.  She talked vaguely of being in Venice some time this autumn; and the vagueness continues.  Arthur, in consequence, roams round disconsolately with no interest but in hotel books.  And for fear lest we should gird up his loins and drag him away with us out of Paradisal possibilities, he is forever praising Venice as a resting-place, and saying he wants to be nowhere else.  The bathing just keeps him alive; but when put to it to explain what charms him since pictures do not, and architecture only slightly, he says in exemplary brotherly fashion that he likes to see me completing my education and enthusiasms,—­and does not realize with how foreign an air that explanation sits upon his shoulders.