at least.

But what I meant by 'apprehending too intensely,' dear Mr. Ruskin, don't
ask me. Really I have forgotten. I suppose I did mean something, though
it was a day of chaos and packing boxes--try to think I did therefore,
and let it pass.

You please me--oh, so much--by the words about my husband. When you
wrote to praise my poems, of course I had to bear it--I couldn't turn
round and say, 'Well, and why don't you praise him, who is worth twenty
of me? Praise my second Me, as well as my Me proper, if you please.'
One's forced to be rather decent and modest for one's husband as well as
for one's self, even if it's harder. I couldn't pull at your coat to
read 'Pippa Passes,' for instance. I can't now.

But you have put him on the shelf, so we have both taken courage to send
you his new volumes, 'Men and Women,' not that you may say 'pleasant
things' of them or think yourself bound to say anything indeed, but that
you may accept them as a sign of the esteem and admiration of both of
us. I consider them on the whole an advance upon his former poems, and
am ready to die at the stake for my faith in these last, even though the
discerning public should set it down afterwards as only a 'Heretic's
Tragedy.'

Our friend Mr. Jarves came to read a part of your letter to us,
confirmatory of doctrines he had heard from us on an earlier day. The
idea of your writing the art criticisms of the 'Leader' (!) was so
stupendously ludicrous, there was no need of faith in your loyalty to
laugh the whole imputation, at first hearing, to uttermost scorn. I must
say, in justice to Mr. Jarves, that he never did really believe one word
of it, though a good deal ruffled and pained that it should have been
believed by anybody. He is full of admiring and grateful feeling for
you, and has gone on to Italy in that mind.

As for me, I almost yearn to go too. We have fallen into a pit here in
Paris, upon evil days and rooms, an impulsive friend having taken an
apartment for us facing the east, insufficiently protected, and with a
bedroom wanting, so that we are still waiting, with trunks unpacked, and
our child sleeping on the floor, till we can get emancipated anyhow.
Then, through the last week's cold, I have not been well--only it will
not, I think, be much, as I am better already, and there will be no
practical end to the talk of Nice and Pau, which my husband had begun a
little. All this has hindered me from following my first impulse of