‘Vexatious’ with you!  Ah, prudence is all very right, and one ought, no doubt, to say, ’of course, we shall not expect a life exempt from the usual proportion of &c. &c.—­’ but truth is still more right, and includes the highest prudence besides, and I do believe that we shall be happy; that is, that you will be happy:  you see I dare confidently expect the end to it all ... so it has always been with me in my life of wonders—­absolute wonders, with God’s hand over all....  And this last and best of all would never have begun so, and gone on so, to break off abruptly even here, in this world, for the little time.

So try, try, dearest, every method, take every measure of hastening such a consummation.  Why, we shall see Italy together!  I could, would, will shut myself in four walls of a room with you and never leave you and be most of all then ’a lord of infinite space’—­but, to travel with you to Italy, or Greece.  Very vain, I know that, all such day dreaming!  And ungrateful, too; with the real sufficing happiness here of being, and knowing that you know me to be, and suffer me to tell you I am yours, ever your own.

God bless you, my dearest—­

E.B.B. to R.B.

[Post-mark, November 1, 1845.]

All to-day, Friday, Miss Mitford has been here!  She came at two and went away at seven—­and I feel as if I had been making a five-hour speech on the corn laws in Harriet Martineau’s parliament; ... so tired I am.  Not that dear Miss Mitford did not talk both for me and herself, ... for that, of course she did.  But I was forced to answer once every ten minutes at least—­and Flush, my usual companion, does not exact so much—­and so I am tired and come to rest myself on this paper.  Your name was not once spoken to-day; a little from my good fencing:  when I saw you at the end of an alley of associations, I pushed the conversation up the next—­because I was afraid of questions such as every moment I expected, with a pair of woman’s eyes behind them; and those are worse than Mr. Kenyon’s, when he puts on his spectacles.  So your name was not once spoken—­not thought of, I do not say—­perhaps when I once lost her at Chevy Chase and found her suddenly with Isidore the queen’s hairdresser, my thoughts might have wandered off to you and your unanswered letter while she passed gradually from that to this—­I am not sure of the contrary.  And Isidore, they say, reads Beranger, and is supposed to be the most literary person at court—­and wasn’t at Chevy Chase one must needs think.

One must needs write nonsense rather—­for I have written it there.  The sense and the truth is, that your letter went to the bottom of my heart, and that my thoughts have turned round it ever since and through all the talking to-day.  Yes indeed, dreams!  But what is not dreaming is this and this—­this reading of these words—­this proof of this regard—­all this that you are to me in fact, and which you cannot guess the