Now, dearest, I will try and write the little I shall be able, in reply to your letter of last week—­and first of all I have to entreat you, now more than ever, to help me and understand from the few words the feelings behind them—­(should speak rather more easily, I think—­but I dare not run the risk:  and I know, after all, you will be just and kind where you can.) I have read your letter again and again.  I will tell you—­no, not you, but any imaginary other person, who should hear what I am going to avow; I would tell that person most sincerely there is not a particle of fatuity, shall I call it, in that avowal; cannot be, seeing that from the beginning and at this moment I never dreamed of winning your love.  I can hardly write this word, so incongruous and impossible does it seem; such a change of our places does it imply—­nor, next to that, though long after, would I, if I could, supplant one of any of the affections that I know to have taken root in you—­that great and solemn one, for instance.  I feel that if I could get myself remade, as if turned to gold, I WOULD not even then desire to become more than the mere setting to that diamond you must always wear.  The regard and esteem you now give me, in this letter, and which I press to my heart and bow my head upon, is all I can take and all too embarrassing, using all my gratitude.  And yet, with that contented pride in being infinitely your debtor as it is, bound to you for ever as it is; when I read your letter with all the determination to be just to us both; I dare not so far withstand the light I am master of, as to refuse seeing that whatever is recorded as an objection to your disposing of that life of mine I would give you, has reference to some supposed good in that life which your accepting it would destroy (of which fancy I shall speak presently)—­I say, wonder as I may at this, I cannot but find it there, surely there.  I could no more ‘bind you by words,’ than you have bound me, as you say—­but if I misunderstand you, one assurance to that effect will be but too intelligible to me—­but, as it is, I have difficulty in imagining that while one of so many reasons, which I am not obliged to repeat to myself, but which any one easily conceives; while any one of those reasons would impose silence on me for ever (for, as I observed, I love you as you now are, and would not remove one affection that is already part of you,)—­would you, being able to speak so, only say that you desire not to put ’more sadness than I was born to,’ into my life?—­that you ’could give me only what it were ungenerous to give’?