But, my sweet, there is safer going in letters than in visits, do you not see?  In the letter, one may go to the utmost limit of one’s supposed tether without danger—­there is the distance so palpably between the most audacious step there, and the next ... which is nowhere, seeing it is not in the letter.  Quite otherwise in personal intercourse, where any indication of turning to a certain path, even, might possibly be checked not for its own fault but lest, the path once reached and proceeded in, some other forbidden turning might come into sight, we will say.  In the letter, all ended there, just there ... and you may think of that, and forgive; at all events, may avoid speaking irrevocable words—­and when, as to me, those words are intensely true, doom-words—­think, dearest!  Because, as I told you once, what most characterizes my feeling for you is the perfect respect in it, the full belief ... (I shall get presently to poor Robert’s very avowal of ’owing you all esteem’!).  It is on that I build, and am secure—­for how should I know, of myself, how to serve you and be properly yours if it all was to be learnt by my own interpreting, and what you professed to dislike you were to be considered as wishing for, and what liking, as it seemed, you were loathing at your heart, and if so many ‘noes’ made a ‘yes,’ and ’one refusal no rebuff’ and all that horrible bestiality which stout gentlemen turn up the whites of their eyes to, when they rise after dinner and pressing the right hand to the left side say, ’The toast be dear woman!’ Now, love, with this feeling in me from the beginning,—­I do believe,—­now, when I am utterly blest in this gift of your love, and least able to imagine what I should do without it,—­I cannot but believe, I say, that had you given me once a ’refusal’—­clearly derived from your own feelings, and quite apart from any fancied consideration for my interests; had this come upon me, whether slowly but inevitably in the course of events, or suddenly as precipitated by any step of mine; I should, believing you, have never again renewed directly or indirectly such solicitation; I should have begun to count how many other ways were yet open to serve you and devote myself to you ... but from the outside, now, and not in your livery!  Now, if I should have acted thus under any circumstances, how could I but redouble my endeavours at precaution after my own foolish—­you know, and forgave long since, and I, too, am forgiven in my own eyes, for the cause, though not the manner—­but could I do other than keep ‘farther from you’ than in the letters, dearest?  For your own part in that matter, seeing it with all the light you have since given me (and then, not inadequately by my own light) I could, I do kiss your feet, kiss every letter in your name, bless you with my whole heart and soul if I could pour them out, from me, before you, to stay and be yours; when I think on