As to the thing which you try to say in the first page of this letter, and which you 'stop' yourself in saying ... I need not stop you in it....
And now there is no time, if I am to sleep to-night. May God bless you, dearest, dearest.
I must be your own while He blesses me.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Friday Afternoon.
[Post-mark, February 20, 1846.]
Here is my Ba's dearest first letter come four hours after the second, with 'Mis-sent to Mitcham' written on its face as a reason,—one more proof of the negligence of somebody! But I do have it at last—what should I say? what do you expect me to say? And the first note seemed quite as much too kind as usual!
Let me write to-morrow, sweet? I am quite well and sure to mind all you bid me. I shall do no more than look in at that place (they are the cousins of a really good friend of mine, Dr. White—I go for him) if even that—for to-morrow night I must go out again, I fear—to pay the ordinary compliment for an invitation to the R.S.'s soirée at Lord Northampton's. And then comes Monday—and to-night any unicorn I may see I will not find myself at liberty to catch. (N.B.—should you meditate really an addition to the 'Elegant Extracts'—mind this last joke is none of mine but my father's; when walking with me when a child, I remember, he bade a little urchin we found fishing with a stick and a string for sticklebacks in a ditch—'to mind that he brought any sturgeon he might catch to the king'—he having a claim on such a prize, by courtesy if not right).
As for Chorley, he is neither the one nor the other of those ugly things. One remembers Regan's 'Oh Heaven—so you will rail at me, when you are in the mood.' But what a want of self-respect such judgments argue, or rather, want of knowledge what true self-respect is: 'So I believed yesterday, and so now—and yet am neither hasty, nor inapprehensive, nor malevolent'—what then?
—But I will say more of my mind—(not of that)—to-morrow, for time presses a little—so bless you my ever ever dearest—I love you wholly.
R.B.