Oh, Ba; not to tell me of the League; the number!—will you please tell me? One letter more I get, do I not? Then comes Thursday—my Thursday.
What you style ‘impertinence’ in your Brother, is very kind and good-natured to my thinking. Well, now—see the way a newspaper criticism affects one, nearly the only way! If this had been an attack—how it would affect you and me matters nothing—it might affect others disagreeably—and through them, us. So I feel very much obliged to Forster in this instance.
I kiss you with perfect love, my sweetest best Ba. May God bless you.
R.
E.B.B. to R.B.
Tuesday.
[Post-mark, April 29, 1846.]
Dearest, you are not to blame the post, nor even me. The reason you did not get the letter was simply that Henrietta slept over the hour, and let it lie on the table till past eight. Still, you should have had it before three perhaps. Only the wrong was less a wrong than you fancied.
For my wrongs, dearest beloved, they are mine I confess, and not yours ... ah, you are ‘evilly persecuted, and entreated’ of me, I must allow. Yet as, with all my calumnious imputations, I think softly to myself seven times seven times a day that no living man is worthy to stand in your footsteps, ... why you must try to forgive and (not) forget me. Do I teaze you past enduring, sometimes? Yes, yes. And wasn’t it my fault about the ‘imaginary woman;’ that heiress, in an hypothesis, of the ‘love’ I ‘made’? Yes, yes, yes—it was, of course. Unless indeed she came out of that famous mist, which you fined me away into, ... the day you slew and idealized me, remember!—and, now I begin to consider, I think she did! So we will share the fault between us, you and I. The odium of it, I was going to say—but odium is by no means the right word, perhaps.
The truth of all is, that you are too much in the excess of goodness, ... that you spoil me! There it is! Did I not tell you, warn you, that I never was used to the purple and fine linen of such an infinite tenderness? If you give me back my sackcloth, I shall know my right hand from my left again, perhaps, ... guess where I stand ... what I am ... recover my common sense. Will you? no—do not.