the beginning, and has persisted past them all. I
began with--a grave assurance that I was in an exceptional position
and saw him just in consequence of it, and that if ever he recurred to
that subject again I never could see him again while I lived; and
he believed me and was silent. To my mind, indeed, it was a bare
impulse--a generous man of quick sympathies taking up a sudden
interest with both hands! So I thought; but in the meantime the
letters and the visits rained down more and more, and in every one
there was something which was too slight to analyse and notice, but
too decided not to be understood; so that at last, when the 'proposed
respect' of the silence gave way, it was rather less dangerous.
So then I showed him how he was throwing into the ashes his best
affections--how the common gifts of youth and cheerfulness were behind
me--how I had not strength, even of _heart_, for the ordinary duties
of life--everything I told him and showed him. 'Look at this--and
this,' throwing down all my disadvantages. To which he did not answer
by a single compliment, but simply that he had not then to choose,
and that I might be right or he might be right, he was not there to
decide; but that he loved me and should to his last hour. He said
that the freshness of youth had passed with him also, and that he
had studied the world out of books and seen many women, yet had never
loved one until he had seen me. That he knew himself, and knew that,
if ever so repulsed, he should love me to his last hour--it should be
first and last. At the same time, he would not tease me, he would wait
twenty years if I pleased, and then, if life lasted so long for both
of us, then when it was ending perhaps, I might understand him and
feel that I might have trusted him. For my health, he had believed
when he first spoke that I was suffering from an incurable injury of
the spine, and that he never could hope to see me stand up before his
face, and he appealed to my womanly sense of what a pure attachment
should be--whether such a circumstance, if it had been true, was
inconsistent with it. He preferred, he said, of free and deliberate
choice, to be allowed to sit only an hour a day by my side, to the
fulfilment of the brightest dream which should exclude me, in any
possible world.

I tell you so much, my ever dear friend, that you may see the manner
of man I have had to do with, and the sort of attachment which for
nearly two years has been dr