thoughts of course, and you have yours, and
the worst is that a third person looking down on us from some
snow-capped height, and free from personal influences, would have
_his_ thoughts too, and _he_ would think that if you had been
reasonable as usual you would have gone to Italy. I have by heart (or
by head at least) what the third person would think. The third person
thundered to me in an abstraction for ever so long, and at intervals I
hear him still, only you shall not to-day, because he talks 'damnable
iterations' and teazes you. Nay, the first person is teazing you now
perhaps, without going any further, and yet I must go a little
further, just to say (after accepting all possible unlikelinesses and
miracles, because everything was miraculous and impossible) that it
was agreed between us long since that you did not love me for
anything--your having no reason for it is the only way of your not
seeming unreasonable. Also _for my own sake_. I like it to be so--I
cannot have peace with the least change from it. Dearest, take the
baron's hawthorn bough which, in spite of his fine dream of it is dead
since the other day, and so much the worse than when I despised it
last--take that dead stick and push it upright into the sand as the
tide rises, and the whole blue sea draws up its glittering breadth and
length towards and around it. But what then? What does _that prove_?
... as the philosopher said of the poem. So we ought not to talk of
such things; and we get warned off even in the accidental
illustrations taken up to light us. Still, the stick certainly did not
draw the sea.

Dearest and best you were yesterday, to write me the little note! You
are better than the imaginations of my heart, and _they_, as far as
they relate to you (not further) are _not_ desperately wicked, I
think. I always expect the kindest things from you, and you always are
doing some kindness beyond what is expected, and this is a miracle
too, like the rest, now isn't it? When the knock came last night, I
knew it was your letter, and not another's. Just another little leaf
of my Koran! How I thank you ... thank you! If I write too kind
letters, as you say, why they may be too kind for me to send, but not
for you to receive; and I suppose I think more of you than of me,
which accounts for my writing them, accounts and justifies. And _that_
is my reflection not now for the first time. For we break rules very
often--as that exegetical third perso