Will you, and must you have ‘Pauline’?  If I could pray you to revoke that decision!  For it is altogether foolish and not boylike—­and I shall, I confess, hate the notion of running over it—­yet commented it must be; more than mere correction!  I was unluckily precocious—­but I had rather you saw real infantine efforts (verses at six years old, and drawings still earlier) than this ambiguous, feverish—­Why not wait?  When you speak of the ’Bookseller’—­I smile, in glorious security—­having a whole bale of sheets at the house-top.  He never knew my name even!—­and I withdrew these after a very little time.

And now—­here is a vexation.  May I be with you (for this once) next Monday, at two instead of three o’clock?  Forster’s business with the new Paper obliges him, he says, to restrict his choice of days to Monday next—­and give up my part of Monday I will never for fifty Forsters—­now, sweet, mind that!  Monday is no common day, but leads to a Saturday—­and if, as I ask, I get leave to call at 2—­and to stay till 3-1/2—­though I then lose nearly half an hour—­yet all will be comparatively well.  If there is any difficulty—­one word and I re-appoint our party, his and mine, for the day the paper breaks down—­not so long to wait, it strikes me!

Now, bless you, my precious Ba—­I am your own—­

—­Your own R.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Thursday Morning.
[Post-mark, January 17, 1846.]

Our letters have crossed; and, mine being the longest, I have a right to expect another directly, I think.  I have been calculating:  and it seems to me—­now what I am going to say may take its place among the paradoxes,—­that I gain most by the short letters.  Last week the only long one came last, and I was quite contented that the ‘old friend’ should come to see you on Saturday and make you send me two instead of the single one I looked for:  it was a clear gain, the little short note, and the letter arrived all the same.  I remember, when I was a child, liking to have two shillings and sixpence better than half a crown—­and now it is the same with this fairy money, which will never turn all into pebbles, or beans, whatever the chronicles may say of precedents.

Arabel did tell Mr. Kenyon (she told me) that ’Mr. Browning would soon go away’—­in reply to an observation of his, that ’he would not stay as I had company’; and altogether it was better,—­the lamp made it look late.  But you do not appear in the least remorseful for being tempted of my black devil, my familiar, to ask such questions and leave me under such an impression—­’mens conscia recti’ too!!—­