it to Henrietta who goes out before eight in the morning and often takes charge of my letters, and it was too late, at the earliest this morning, to feel a little ashamed.  Miss Thomson told me that she had determined to change the type of the few pages of her letterpress which had been touched, and that therefore Mr. Burges’s revisions of my translations should be revised back again.  She appears to be a very acute person, full of quick perceptions—­naturally quick, and carefully trained—­a little over anxious perhaps about mental lights, and opening her eyes still more than she sees, which is a common fault of clever people, if one must call it a fault.  I like her, and she is kind and cordial.  Will she ask you to help her book with a translation or two, I wonder.  Perhaps—­if the courage should come.  Dearest, how I shall think of you this evening, and how near you will seem, not to be here.  I had a letter from Mr. Mathews the other day, and smiled to read in it just what I had expected, that he immediately sent Landor’s verses on you to a few editors, friends of his, in order to their communication to the public.  He received my apology for myself with the utmost graciousness.  A kind good man he is.

After all, do you know, I am a little vexed that I should have even seemed to do wrong in my speech about the letters.  It must have been wrong, if it seemed so to you, I fancy now.  Only I really did no more mean to try your letters ... mine ... such as they are to me now, by the common critical measure, than the shepherds praised the pure tenor of the angels who sang ‘Peace upon earth’ to them.  It was enough that they knew it for angels’ singing.  So do you forgive me, beloved, and put away from you the thought that I have let in between us any miserable stuff ‘de metier,’ which I hate as you hate.  And I will not say any more about it, not to run into more imprudences of mischief.

On the other hand I warn you against saying again what you began to say yesterday and stopped.  Do not try it again.  What may be quite good sense from me, is from you very much the reverse, and pray observe that difference.  Or did you think that I was making my own road clear in the the thing I said about—­’jilts’?  No, you did not.  Yet I am ready to repeat of myself as of others, that if I ceased to love you, I certainly would act out the whole consequence—­but that is an impossible ‘if’ to my nature, supposing the conditions of it otherwise to be probable.  I never loved anyone much and ceased to love that person.  Ask every friend of mine, if I am given to change even in friendship! And to you...! Ah, but you never think of such a thing seriously—­and you are conscious that you did not say it very sagely.  You and I are in different positions.  Now let me tell you an apologue in exchange for your Wednesday’s stories which I liked so, and mine perhaps may make you ’a little wiser’—­who knows?