Robert and I are deep in the fourth month of wedlock; there has not been a shadow between us, nor a word (and I have observed that all married people confess to words), and that the only change I can lay my finger on in him is simply and clearly an increase of affection.  Now I need not say it if I did not please, and I should not please, you know, to tell a story.  The truth is, that I who always did certainly believe in love, yet was as great a sceptic as you about the evidences thereof, and having held twenty times that Jacob’s serving fourteen years for Rachel was not too long by fourteen days, I was not a likely person (with my loathing dread of marriage as a loveless state, and absolute contentment with single life as the alternative to the great majorities of marriages), I was not likely to accept a feeling not genuine, though from the hand of Apollo himself, crowned with his various godships.  Especially too, in my position, I could not, would not, should not have done it.  Then, genuine feelings are genuine feelings, and do not pass like a cloud.  We are as happy as people can be, I do believe, yet are living in a way to try this new relationship of ours—­in the utmost seclusion and perpetual tete-a-tete—­no amusement nor distraction from without, except some of the very dullest Italian romances which throw us back on the memory of Balzac with reiterated groans.  The Italians seem to hang on translations from the French—­as we find from the library—­not merely of Balzac, but Dumas, your Dumas, and reaching lower—­long past De Kock—­to the third and fourth rate novelists.  What is purely Italian is, as far as we have read, purely dull and conventional.  There is no breath nor pulse in the Italian genius.  Mrs. Jameson writes to us from Florence that in politics and philosophy the people are getting alive—­which may be, for aught we know to the contrary, the poetry and imagination leave them room enough by immense vacancies.

Yet we delight in Italy, and dream of ‘pleasures new’ for the summer—­pastures new, I should have said—­but it comes to the same thing.  The padrone in this house sent us in as a gift (in gracious recognition, perhaps, of our lawful paying of bills) an immense dish of oranges—­two hanging on a stalk with the green leaves still moist with the morning’s dew—­every great orange of twelve or thirteen with its own stalk and leaves.  Such a pretty sight!  And better oranges, I beg to say, never were eaten, when we are barbarous enough to eat them day by day after our two o’clock dinner, softening, with the vision of them, the winter which has just shown itself.  Almost I have been as pleased with the oranges as I was at Avignon by the pomegranate given to me much in the same way.  Think of my being singled out of all our caravan of travellers—­Mrs. Jameson and Gerardine Jameson[153] both there—­for that significant gift of the pomegranates!  I had never seen one before, and, of course, proceeded instantly to cut one ’deep down the middle’[154]—­accepting the omen.  Yet, in shame and confusion of face, I confess to not being able to appreciate it properly.  Olives and pomegranates I set on the same shelf, to be just looked at and called by their names, but by no means eaten bodily.