What nonsense and foolishness I take it into my head to send you sometimes.
I was down-stairs to-day but not out of the house. Now you are talking, now you are laughing—I think that almost I can hear you when I listen hard ... at Mr. Procter’s!
Do you, on the other side, hear me? ... and how I am calling myself your very own
Ba.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Thursday.
[Post-mark, May 7, 1846.]
No, dearest,—I get Mrs. Jameson’s leave to put the breakfast off till to-morrow—and this morning, instead of resting as I had intended, I wisely went to town, to get a call on Forster off my mind—I have walked there and back again ... see the weakness you pity! I cheat you, my Ba, of all that pity ... yet when I have got it, however unjustly, I lay it to my heart.
And I was at Mrs. Procter’s last night—Kinglake and Chorley, with a little of Milnes and Coventry Patmore—but no Howitts: because they have a sick child,—dying, I am afraid. On my return I found a note from Horne, who is in London of a sudden for a week.
Oh,—The Daily News passes into the redoubtable hands of Mr. Dilke,—and the price is to be reduced to 2½d, in emulation of the system recently adopted by the French Journals. Forster continues to write, on the new Editor’s particular entreaty. I rather think the scheme will succeed, Dilke having the experience the present régime wants—he will buy his privileges cheaply too. So that Chorley may possibly be employed. Here ends my patronage of it, at all events—not another number do I groan over!