Perhaps in the days to come we shall look back on these days as covetable things. Will you do so, because you were loved in them as a beginning, or because you were free? (Am I not as bad as Flush, to ask such questions?) I shall look back on these days gratefully and gladly, because the good in them has overcome the evil, for the first time in days of mine. Yet my position is worse than yours on some accounts—now. Henrietta has had a letter from Capt. Surtees Cook who says in it, she says, ... ‘I hope that poor Ba will have courage to the end.’ There’s a generous sympathy! Tell me that there is none in the world!
Will you let me know how you are? Such a letter you wrote to me on Sunday! Ah!—to be anything to you ... what is the colour of ambition afterwards? When I look forwards I can see no work and no rest, but what is for you and in you. Even Duty seems to concentrate itself into one Debt—Dearest!
Yet it will be a little otherwise perhaps!—not that ever I shall love you otherwise or less—No.
You shall see some day at Pisa what I will not show you now. Does not Solomon say that ‘there is a time to read what is written.’ If he doesn’t, he ought.
Your very own Ba.
E.B.B. to R.B.
Wednesday.
[Post-mark, July 23, 1846.]
Dearest, what you say is unnecessary for you to say—it is in everything so of course and obvious! You must have an eccentric idea of me if you can suppose for a moment such things to be necessary to say. If they had been unsaid, it would have been precisely the same, believe me, in the event.
As to the way of living—now you shall arrange that for yourself. You shall choose your own lodging, order your own dinner ... and if you choose to live on locusts and wild honey, I promise not to complain ... I shall not indeed be inclined to complain ... having no manner of ambition about carriages and large houses, even if they were within our possibilities,—which they may not be, according to Mr. Surtees’s calculation or experience. The more simply we live, the better for me! So you shall arrange it for yourself, lest I should make a mistake! ... which, in that question, is a just possible thing.
One extravagance I had intended to propose to you ... but it shall be exactly as you like, and I hesitate a little as I begin to speak of it. I have thought of taking Wilson with me, ... for a year, say, if we returned then—if not, we might send her home alone ... and by that time, I should be stronger perhaps and wiser ... rather less sublimely helpless and impotent than I am now. My sisters have urged me a good deal in this matter—but if you would rather it were otherwise, be honest and say so, and let me alter my thoughts at once. There is one consideration which I submit to yours, ... that I cannot leave this house with the necessary number of shoes and pocket handkerchiefs, without help from somebody. Now whoever helps me, will suffer through me. If I left her behind she would be turned into the street before sunset. Would it be right and just of me, to permit it? Consider! I must manage a sheltering ignorance for my poor sisters, at the last, ... and for all our sakes. And in order to that, again, I must have some one else in my confidence. Whom, again, I would unwillingly single out for an absolute victim.