you believe this gift impossible—­and I acquiesce entirely—­I submit wholly to you; repose on you in all the faith of which I am capable.  Those obstacles are solely for you to see and to declare ... had I seen them, be sure I should never have mocked you or myself by affecting to pass them over ... what were obstacles, I mean:  but you do see them, I must think,—­and perhaps they strike me the more from my true, honest unfeigned inability to imagine what they are,—­not that I shall endeavour.  After what you also apprise me of, I know and am joyfully confident that if ever they cease to be what you now consider them, you who see now for me, whom I implicitly trust in to see for me; you will then, too, see and remember me, and how I trust, and shall then be still trusting.  And until you so see, and so inform me, I shall never utter a word—­for that would involve the vilest of implications.  I thank God—­I do thank him, that in this whole matter I have been, to the utmost of my power, not unworthy of his introducing you to me, in this respect that, being no longer in the first freshness of life, and having for many years now made up my mind to the impossibility of loving any woman ... having wondered at this in the beginning, and fought not a little against it, having acquiesced in it at last, and accounted for it all to myself, and become, if anything, rather proud of it than sorry ...  I say, when real love, making itself at once recognized as such, did reveal itself to me at last, I did open my heart to it with a cry—­nor care for its overturning all my theory—­nor mistrust its effect upon a mind set in ultimate order, so I fancied, for the few years more—­nor apprehend in the least that the new element would harm what was already organized without its help.  Nor have I, either, been guilty of the more pardonable folly, of treating the new feeling after the pedantic fashions and instances of the world.  I have not spoken when it did not speak, because ‘one’ might speak, or has spoken, or should speak, and ‘plead’ and all that miserable work which, after all, I may well continue proud that I am not called to attempt. Here for instance, now ... ‘one’ should despair; but ‘try again’ first, and work blindly at removing those obstacles (—­if I saw them, I should be silent, and only speak when a month hence, ten years hence, I could bid you look where they were)—­and ‘one’ would do all this, not for the play-acting’s sake, or to ‘look the character’ ... (that would be something quite different from folly ...) but from a not unreasonable anxiety lest by too sudden a silence, too complete an acceptance of your will; the earnestness and endurance and unabatedness ... the truth, in fact, of what had already been professed, should get to be questioned—­But I believe that you believe me—­And now that all is clear between us I will say, what you will