Mister Hayley ... so are you....

reply complimentary.  All I observed concerning yourself, was the combination—­which not an idiom in chivalry could treat grammatically as a thing common to me and you, inasmuch as everyone who has known me for half a day, may know that, if there is anything peculiar in me, it lies for the most part in an extraordinary deficiency in this and this and this, ... there is no need to describe what.  Only nuns of the strictest sect of the nunneries are rather wiser in some points, and have led less restricted lives than I have in others.  And if it had not been for my ’carpet-work’—­

Well—­and do you know that I have, for the last few years, taken quite to despise book-knowledge and its effect on the mind—­I mean when people live by it as most readers by profession do, ... cloistering their souls under these roofs made with heads, when they might be under the sky.  Such people grow dark and narrow and low, with all their pains.

Friday.—­I was writing you see before you came—­and now I go on in haste to speak ‘off my mind’ some things which are on it.  First ... of yourself; how can it be that you are unwell again, ... and that you should talk (now did you not?—­did I not hear you say so?) of being ‘weary in your soul’ ... you?  What should make you, dearest friend, weary in your soul; or out of spirits in any way?—­Do ... tell me....  I was going to write without a pause—­and almost I might, perhaps, ... even as one of the two hundred of your friends, ... almost I might say out that ‘Do tell me.’  Or is it (which I am inclined to think most probable) that you are tired of a same life and want change?  It may happen to anyone sometimes, and is independent of your will and choice, you know—­and I know, and the whole world knows:  and would it not therefore be wise of you, in that case, to fold your life new again and go abroad at once?  What can make you weary in your soul, is a problem to me.  You are the last from whom I should have expected such a word.  And you did say so, I think.  I think that it was not a mistake of mine.  And you, ... with a full liberty, and the world in your hand for every purpose and pleasure of it!—­Or is it that, being unwell, your spirits are affected by that?  But then you might be more unwell than you like to admit—.  And I am teasing you with talking of it ... am I not?—­and being disagreeable is only one third of the way towards being useful, it is good to remember in time.

And then the next thing to write off my mind is ... that you must not, you must not, make an unjust opinion out of what I said to-day.  I have been uncomfortable since, lest you should—­and perhaps it would have been better if I had not said it apart from all context in that way; only that you could not long be a friend of mine without knowing and seeing what so lies on the surface.  But then, ... as far as