Have I your meaning here?  In so many words, is it on my account that you bid me ‘leave this subject’?  I think if it were so, I would for once call my advantages round me.  I am not what your generous self-forgetting appreciation would sometimes make me out—­but it is not since yesterday, nor ten nor twenty years before, that I began to look into my own life, and study its end, and requirements, what would turn to its good or its loss—­and I know, if one may know anything, that to make that life yours and increase it by union with yours, would render me supremely happy, as I said, and say, and feel.  My whole suit to you is, in that sense, selfish—­not that I am ignorant that your nature would most surely attain happiness in being conscious that it made another happy—­but that best, best end of all, would, like the rest, come from yourself, be a reflection of your own gift.

Dearest, I will end here—­words, persuasion, arguments, if they were at my service I would not use them—­I believe in you, altogether have faith in you—­in you.  I will not think of insulting by trying to reassure you on one point which certain phrases in your letter might at first glance seem to imply—­you do not understand me to be living and labouring and writing (and not writing) in order to be successful in the world’s sense?  I even convinced the people here what was my true ‘honourable position in society,’ &c. &c. therefore I shall not have to inform you that I desire to be very rich, very great; but not in reading Law gratis with dear foolish old Basil Montagu, as he ever and anon bothers me to do;—­much less—­enough of this nonsense.

‘Tell me what I have a claim to hear’:  I can hear it, and be as grateful as I was before and am now—­your friendship is my pride and happiness.  If you told me your love was bestowed elsewhere, and that it was in my power to serve you there, to serve you there would still be my pride and happiness.  I look on and on over the prospect of my love, it is all onwards—­and all possible forms of unkindness ...  I quite laugh to think how they are behind ... cannot be encountered in the route we are travelling!  I submit to you and will obey you implicitly—­obey what I am able to conceive of your least desire, much more of your expressed wish.  But it was necessary to make this avowal, among other reasons, for one which the world would recognize too.  My whole scheme of life (with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down) was long ago calculated—­and it supposed you, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible—­because in calculating one goes upon chances, not on providence—­how could I expect you?  So for my own future way in the world I have always refused to care—­any one who can live a couple of years and more on bread and potatoes as I did once on a time, and who prefers a blouse and a blue shirt (such as I now write in)