Dear Miss Barrett, I thank you for the leave you give me, and for the infinite kindness of the way of giving it.  I will call at 2 on Tuesday—­not sooner, that you may have time to write should any adverse circumstances happen ... not that they need inconvenience you, because ... what I want particularly to tell you for now and hereafter—­do not mind my coming in the least, but—­should you be unwell, for instance,—­just send or leave word, and I will come again, and again, and again—­my time is of no importance, and I have acquaintances thick in the vicinity.

Now if I do not seem grateful enough to you, am I so much to blame?  You see it is high time you saw me, for I have clearly written myself out!

Ever yours,

R.B.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Saturday.
[Post-mark, May 17, 1845.]

I shall be ready on Tuesday I hope, but I hate and protest against your horrible ‘entomology.’  Beginning to explain, would thrust me lower and lower down the circles of some sort of an ‘Inferno’; only with my dying breath I would maintain that I never could, consciously or unconsciously, mean to distrust you; or, the least in the world, to Simpsonize you.  What I said, ... it was you that put it into my head to say it—­for certainly, in my usual disinclination to receive visitors, such a feeling does not enter.  There, now!  There, I am a whole ‘giro’ lower!  Now, you will say perhaps that I distrust you, and nobody else!  So it is best to be silent, and bear all the ’cutting things’ with resignation! that is certain.

Still I must really say, under this dreadful incubus-charge of Simpsonism, ... that you, who know everything, or at least make awful guesses at everything in one’s feelings and motives, and profess to be able to pin them down in a book of classified inscriptions, ... should have been able to understand better, or misunderstand less, in a matter like this—­Yes!  I think so.  I think you should have made out the case in some such way as it was in nature—­viz. that you had lashed yourself up to an exorbitant wishing to see me, ... (you who could see, any day, people who are a hundredfold and to all social purposes, my superiors!) because I was unfortunate enough to be shut up in a room and silly enough to make a fuss about opening the door; and that I grew suddenly abashed by the consciousness of this.  How different from a distrust of you! how different!

Ah—­if, after this day, you ever see any interpretable sign of distrustfulness in me, you may be ‘cutting’ again, and I will not cry out.  In the meantime here is a fact for your ‘entomology.’  I have not so much distrust, as will make a doubt, as will make a curiosity for next Tuesday.  Not the simplest modification of curiosity enters into the state of feeling with which I wait for Tuesday:—­and if you are angry to hear me say so, ... why, you are more unjust than ever.