I mustn’t write you more of a letter to-day. With love and kisses to Maud and baby and Papa and Mama.
About 1878.
To Mr. Ruskin.
Thank you very much for your letter.
Please don’t think about me. If in anything you ever did or thought there is anything you would wish otherwise, forget it, as if it had never been. Never mind telling me, or even telling yourself, whether there was anything, or nothing, or if anything how much, or what it was; just, if it occurs to you, put it from you like an unreal thing; never let it trouble you. You know this is what I wish always.
Be sure not to trouble, so far as I am concerned, about any painful thoughts of me, which remain to you, if such there be. They are either true and will abide, or false and will vanish—it can but be for a little time.
Bagnieres de Bigorre,
February 5th, 1879.
To Mrs. Edmund Maurice.
There’s a thing I am anxious about; and that is I fear I’ve led you into what may be troublesome, as it turns out, and that is the Kyrle Open Spaces Committee.... You never said or felt or implied that you’d time for a great new work, which this kindling would be; and I write to say to you that I quite realise this, and shall not be surprised or disappointed that the K. S. C. becomes a very different thing from what we three talked of that morning, or even what I wrote of from Paris. I daresay you and E. will manage to make it a most useful opening up of the Open Space Kyrle work in London; and this will indirectly help the wilder commons slowly; in fact there need be no difference in programme; but I think you ought at once to know that I see a wide difference in expectation. It is clear there is no large or zealous body to gather together; you can’t even get an Hon. Sec., but the effort will be good as far as it goes.... It is the want of general interest, without a fire in the midst, that is telling. But never mind; only don’t think I expect much, nor strain yourself to do anything you don’t see your way to. Take it very quietly; go on till it grows into more life, if it may be, before all the commons are gone....