While we were talking, Papa came into the room. My aunt said, ‘How well she is looking’—‘Do you think so?’ he said. ‘Why, do not you think so? Do you pretend to say that you see no surprising difference in her?’—‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he went on to say. ‘She is mumpish, I think.’ Mumpish!
‘She does not talk,’ resumed he—
‘Perhaps she is nervous’—my aunt apologised—I said not one word ... When birds have their eyes out, they are apt to be mumpish.
Mumpish! The expression proved a displeasure. Yet I am sure that I have shown as little sullenness as was possible. To be very talkative and vivacious under such circumstances as those of mine, would argue insensibility, and was certainly beyond my power.
I told her gently afterwards that she had been wrong in speaking of me at all—a wrong with a right intention,—as all her wrongness must be. She was very sorry to have done it, she said, and looked sorry.
Poor Papa!—Presently I shall be worse to him than ‘mumpish’ even. But then, I hope, he will try to forgive me, as I have forgiven him, long ago.
My own beloved—do you know that your letter caught me in the act of wondering whether the absence would do me harm with you, according to that memorable theory. And so in the midst came the solution of the doubt—you do not love me less. Nay, you love me more—ah, but if you say so, I am capable of wishing not to see you for a month added to the week! For did I not once confess to you that I loved your love as much as I loved you ... or very, very, very nearly as much? Not precisely so much. Confiteor tibi—but I will sing a penitential psalm low to myself and do the act of penance by seeing you to-morrow if you choose to come,—and then you shall absolve me and give me the Benedicite, which, if you come, you cannot keep back, because it comes with you of necessity.
Not a word of your head, nor of your mother! You should come I think, to-morrow, if only to say it. Yet let us be wise to the end. Be you wise to the end, and decide between Saturday and Monday. And I, for my part, promise to go to Italy, only with you—do not be afraid.
And for your poetry, I believe in it as ‘golden water’—and the ‘singing tree’ does not hide it from me with all the overdropping branches and leaves. In fact, the chief inconvenience we are likely to suffer from, in the way of income, is the having too much. Don’t you think so? But in that case, we will buy an island of our own in one of those purple seas, and inherit the sun—or perhaps the shadow ... of Calypso’s cave.