The pretty, pretty plan you devise for our meeting here during Passion week, dear Hal, is a baseless vision. Our friends go up to London the week after next, and I do not know when I shall be able again to stay so far from it.
I have written to Moxon about the publication of my journal, and I received a note from him this morning, intimating his purpose of visiting me here, in the course of to-day, at which I feel rather nervously dismayed.... There is a great quantity of it, and I suppose my return to the stage may perhaps have some effect in increasing its sale.
Emily and I walk every day together, up and down the shrubbery and round the gardens; and innumerable are the ejaculations of "Oh, how I wish dear Hal was with us!" You are our proper complement, the missing side of the triangle, and it is unnatural for us two to be together here without you.
Mrs. FitzHugh is certainly a wonderful old woman, especially in her kindliness and happy, easy cheerfulness....
We drive every day for about an hour in the pony-carriage, and walk again for about half an hour afterwards....
And now, God bless you, my dearest Hal. I long to see you, and am most thankful for all the tender, devoted, anxious affection you bestow on me; I am unspeakably grateful to you. Kiss dear Dorothy for me, and tell her for goodness' sake to exert herself, and either be, or allow you to be, slightly ridiculous, or she will die of perfection, and you of a plethora of absurdity, or ridiculousness rentré—struck in, as the French say.
I forgot to tell you that —— has declined my terms, but offered me others, which I have declined. I have still two other managers, with one of whom I think I may perhaps be able to come to some agreement.
EDWARD MOXON. Since writing thus far, I have seen Moxon, who has offered me far more than I expected for my journal before reading it; begging me to let him pay me a portion of it at once, and adding that if, upon perusal of the manuscript, he thinks his profits likely to warrant his giving me more than the sum now named, he should not consider himself justified in not doing so by the fact of his having offered me less.
Good-bye, dearest.
Yours ever,