against him, declaring I was “too sensible a girl for nonsense of that sort.” (It is a little weakness of hers, you know, to resent extremes of endearment towards anyone but herself in those she has “brooded,” and she has thought us hitherto most restrained and proper—­as, indeed, have we not been?) Arthur and I exchanged tokens of truce:  in a little while off went my aunt to bed, leaving us alone.  Then, for he is the one of us that I am most frank with:  “Arthur,” cried I, and up came your little locket like a bucket from a well, for him to have his first sight of you, my Beloved.  He objected that he could not see faces in a nutshell; and I suppose others cannot:  only I.

He, too, is gone.  If you had been coming he would have spared another day—­for to-day was planned and dated, you will remember—­and we would have ridden halfway to meet you.  But, as fate has tripped you, and made all comings on your part indefinite, he sends you his hopes for a later meeting.

How is your poor foot?  I suppose, as it is ill, I may send it a kiss by post and wish it well?  I do.  Truly, you are to let me know if it gives you much pain, and I will lie awake thinking of you.  This is not sentimental, for if one knows that a friend is occupied over one’s sleeplessness one feels the comfort.

I am perplexed how else to give you my company:  your mother, I know, could not yet truly welcome me; and I wish to be as patient as possible, and not push for favors that are not offered.  So I cannot come and ask to take you out in her carriage, nor come and carry you away in mine.  We must try how fast we can hold hands at a distance.

I have kept up to where you have been reading in “Richard Feverel,” though it has been a scramble:  for I have less opportunity of reading, I with my feet, than you without yours.  In your book I have just got to the smuggling away of General Monk in the perforated coffin, and my sense of history capitulates in an abandonment of laughter.  I yield!  The Gaul’s invasion of Britain always becomes broad farce when he attempts it.  This in clever ludicrousness beats the unintentional comedy of Victor Hugo’s “John-Jim-Jack” as a name typical of Anglo-Saxon christenings.  But Dumas, through a dozen absurdities, knows apparently how to stalk his quarry:  so large a genius may play the fool and remain wise.

You see I have given your author a warm welcome at last:  and what about you and mine?  Tell me you love his women and I will not be jealous.  Indeed, outside him I don’t know where to find a written English woman of modern times whom I would care to meet, or could feel honestly bound to look up to:—­nowhere will I have her shaking her ringlets at me in Dickens or Thackeray.  Scott is simply not modern; and Hardy’s women, if they have nobility in them, get so cruelly broken on the wheel that you get but the wrecks of them at last.  It is only his charming baggages who come to a good ending.