is the respectability?  And they are furious with her, which is not to be wondered at after all.  Her counsel had an interview with her previous to the trial, to satisfy themselves of her good faith, and she was quite resolute and earnest, persisting in every statement.  On the coming out of the anonymous letters, Fitzroy Kelly said to the juniors that if anyone could suggest a means of explanation, he would be eager to carry forward the case, ... but for him he saw no way of escaping from the fact of the guilt of their client.  Not a voice could speak for her.  So George was told.  There is no ground for a prosecution for a conspiracy, he says, but she is open to the charge for forgery, of course, and to the dreadful consequences, though it is not considered at all likely that Lord Ferrers could wish to disturb her beyond the ruin she has brought on her own life.

Think of Miss Mitford’s growing quite cold about Mr. Chorley who has spent two days with her lately, and of her saying in a letter to me this morning that he is very much changed and grown to be ’a presumptuous coxcomb.’  He has displeased her in some way—­that is clear.  What changes there are in the world.

Should I ever change to you, do you think, ... even if you came to ’love me less’—­not that I meant to reproach you with that possibility.  May God bless you, dear dearest.  It is another miracle (beside the many) that I get nearer to the mountains yet still they seem more blue.  Is not that strange?

Ever and wholly

Your BA.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Thursday Evening.
[Post-mark, February 20, 1846.]

And I offended you by praising your letters—­or rather mine, if you please—­as if I had not the right!  Still, you shall not, shall not fancy that I meant to praise them in the way you seem to think—­by calling them ‘graphic,’ ’philosophic,’—­why, did I ever use such words?  I agree with you that if I could play critic upon your letters, it would be an end!—­but no, no ...  I did not, for a moment.  In what I said I went back to my first impressions—­and they were vital letters, I said—­which was the resume of my thoughts upon the early ones you sent me, because I felt your letters to be you from the very first, and I began, from the beginning, to read every one several times over.  Nobody, I felt, nobody of all these writers, did write as you did.  Well!—­and had I not a right to say that now at last, and was it not natural to say just that, when I was talking of other people’s letters and how it had grown almost impossible for me to read them; and do I deserve to be scolded?  No indeed.

And if I had the misfortune to think now, when you say it is a fine day, that that is said in more music than it could be said in by another—­where is the sin against you, I should like to ask.  It is yourself who is the critic, I think, after all.  But over all the brine, I hold my letters—­just as Camoens did his poem.  They are best to me—­and they are best.  I knew what they were, before I knew what you were—­all of you.  And I like to think that I never fancied anyone on a level with you, even in a letter.