Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 29th June, 1879.
Your description of the effects you feel from the restless, tormenting winds would serve well to represent my experience too. It seems something incredible written in my memory that when I was a little girl I loved the wind—used to like to walk about when it was blowing great guns. And now the wind is to me what it was to early peoples—a demon-god, cruelly demanding all sorts of human sacrifices. Thank you, dear, for caring whether I have any human angels to guard me. None are permanently here except my servants, but Sir James Paget has been down to see me, I have a very comfortable country practitioner to watch over me from day to day, and there is a devoted friend who is backward and forward continually to see that I lack nothing.
It is a satisfaction to me that you felt the need for "Debasing the Moral Currency" to be written. I was determined to do it, though it might make me a stone of stumbling and rock of offence to all the comic tribe.
Do not rate my illness too high in the scale of mortal misery. I am prone to make much of my ailments, and am among the worst at enduring pain.
Letter to John Blackwood, 29th June, 1879.
Thank you for sending me the pretty little book.[37] I am deeply touched by the account of its origin, and I remember well everything you said to me of Mr. Brown in old days when he was still with you. I had only cut a very little way into the volume when a friend came and carried it off, but my eyes had already been arrested by some remarks on the character of Harold Transome, which seemed to me more penetrating and finely felt than almost anything I have read in the way of printed comment on my own writing. When my friend brings back the volume I shall read it reverentially, and most probably with a sense of being usefully admonished. For praise and sympathy arouse much more self-suspicion and sense of shortcoming than all the blame and depreciation of all the Pepins.
I am better, and I hope on the way to complete recovery, but I am still at some distance from that goal. Perhaps if the winds would give one some rest from their tormenting importunity, both you and I should get on faster.
I am looking forward to reading the "Recollections of Ekowe" in "Maga," which came to me yesterday, with its list of my own doings and misdoings on the cover.
Does not this Zulu war seem to you a horribly bad business?