And now, my Audience, my crown-bearer, my path-preparer—­I am with you again and out of them all—­there, here, in my arms, is my proved palpable success!  My life, my poetry, gained nothing, oh no!—­but this found them, and blessed them.  On Tuesday I shall see you, dearest—­am much better; well to-day—­are you well—­or ’scarcely to be called an invalid’?  Oh, when I have you, am by you—­

Bless you, dearest—­And be very sure you have your wish about the length of the week—­still Tuesday must come!  And with it your own, happy, grateful

R.B.

E.B.B. to R.B.

                              Tuesday Night.
                              [Post-mark, January 14, 1846.]

Ah Mr. Kenyon!—­how he vexed me to-day.  To keep away all the ten days before, and to come just at the wrong time after all!  It was better for you, I suppose—­believe—­to go with him down-stairs—­yes, it certainly was better:  it was disagreeable enough to be very wise!  Yet I, being addicted to every sort of superstition turning to melancholy, did hate so breaking off in the middle of that black thread ... (do you remember what we were talking of when they opened the door?) that I was on the point of saying ‘Stay one moment,’ which I should have repented afterwards for the best of good reasons.  Oh, I should have liked to have ‘fastened off’ that black thread, and taken one stitch with a blue or a green one!

You do not remember what we were talking of? what you, rather, were talking of?  And what I remember, at least, because it is exactly the most unkind and hard thing you ever said to me—­ever dearest, so I remember it by that sign!  That you should say such a thing to me—! think what it was, for indeed I will not write it down here—­it would be worse than Mr. Powell!  Only the foolishness of it (I mean, the foolishness of it alone) saves it, smooths it to a degree!—­the foolishness being the same as if you asked a man where he would walk when he lost his head.  Why, if you had asked St. Denis beforehand, he would have thought it a foolish question.

And you!—­you, who talk so finely of never, never doubting; of being such an example in the way of believing and trusting—­it appears, after all, that you have an imagination apprehensive (or comprehensive) of ‘glass bottles’ like other sublunary creatures, and worse than some of them.  For mark, that I never went any farther than to the stone-wall hypothesis of your forgetting me!—­I always stopped there—­and never climbed, to the top of it over the broken-bottle fortification, to see which way you meant to walk afterwards.  And you, to ask me so coolly—­think what you asked me.  That you should have the heart to ask such a question!