And so back to my spring weather:  all in a moment you gave me a whole week of the weather I had longed after.  For you say the sun has been shining on you:  and I would rather have it there than here if it refuses to be in two places at once.  Also my letters have pleased you.  When they do, I feel such a proud mother to them!  Here they fly quick out of the nest; but I think sometimes they must come to you broken-winged, with so much meant and all so badly put.

How can we ever, with our poor handful of senses, contrive to express ourselves perfectly?  Perhaps,—­I don’t know:—­dearest, I love you!  I kiss you a hundred times to the minute.  If everything in the world were dark round us, could not kisses tell us quite well all that we wish to know of each other?—­me that you were true and brave and so beautiful that a woman must be afraid looking at you:—­and you that I was just my very self,—­loving and—­no! just loving:  I have no room for anything more!  You have swallowed up all my moral qualities, I have none left:  I am a beggar, where it is so sweet to beg.—­Give me back crumbs of myself!  I am so hungry, I cannot show it, only by kissing you a hundred times.

Dear share of the world, what a wonderful large helping of it you are to me!  I alter Portia’s complaint and swear that “my little body is bursting with this great world.”  And now it is written and I look at it, it seems a Budge and Toddy sort of complaint.  I do thank Heaven that the Godhead who rules in it for us does not forbid the recognition of the ludicrous!  C——­ was telling me how long ago, in her own dull Protestant household, she heard a riddle propounded by some indiscreet soul who did not understand the prudish piety which reigned there:  and saw such shocked eyes opening all round on the sound of it.  “What is it,” was asked, “that a common man can see every day but that God never sees?” “His equal” is the correct answer:  but even so demure and proper a support to thistly theology was to the ears that heard it as the hand of Uzzah stretched out intrusively and deserving to be smitten.  As for C——­, a twinkle of wickedness seized her, she hazarded “A joke” to be the true answer, and was ordered into banishment by the head of that God-fearing household for having so successfully diagnosed the family skeleton.

As for skeletons, why your letter makes me so happy is that the one which has been rubbing its ribs against you for so long seems to have given itself a day off, or crumbled to dissolution.  And you are yourself again, as you have not been for many a long day.  I suppose there has been thunder, and the air is cleared:  and I am not to know any of that side of your discomforts?

Still I do know.  You have been writing your letters with pressed lips for a month past:  and I have been a mere toy-thing, and no helpmate to you at all at all.  Oh, why will she not love me?  I know I am lovable except to a very hard heart, and hers is not:  it is only like yours, reserved in its expression.  It is strange what pain her prejudice has been able to drop into my cup of happiness; and into yours, dearest, I fear, even more.