what last letter meant, and then more. You are to know, then
that for some reason, that looked like an instinct, I thought I ought
not to send shaft on shaft, letter-plague on letter, with such an
uninterrupted clanging ... that I ought to wait, say a week at least
having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your
dogs--but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further
that when I _did_ think I might go modestly on, ... [Greek: omoi], let
me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what
dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away
(not from _you_, but from you in your special capacity of being
_written_-to, not spoken-to) when I turned again you had grown
formidable somehow--though that's not the word,--nor are you the
person, either,--it was my fortune, my privilege of being your friend
this one way, that it seemed a shame for me to make no better use of
than taking it up with talk about books and I don't know what. Write
what I will, you would read for once, I think--well, then,--what I
shall write shall be--something on this book, and the other book, and
my own books, and Mary Hewitt's books, and at the end of it--good bye,
and I hope here is a quarter of an hour rationally spent. So the
thought of what I should find in my heart to say, and the contrast
with what I suppose I ought to say ... all these things are against
me. But this is very foolish, all the same, I need not be told--and is
part and parcel of an older--indeed primitive body of mine, which I
shall never wholly get rid of, of desiring to do nothing when I cannot
do all; seeing nothing, getting, enjoying nothing, where there is no
seeing and getting and enjoying _wholly_--and in this case, moreover,
you are _you_, and know something about me, if not much, and have read
Bos on the art of supplying Ellipses, and (after, particularly, I have
confessed all this, why and how it has been) you will _subaudire_ when
I pull out my Mediaeval-Gothic-Architectural-Manuscript (so it was, I
remember now,) and instruct you about corbeils and ogives ... though,
after all, it was none of Vivian's doing, that,--all the uncle kind or
man's, which I never professed to be. Now you see how I came to say
some nonsense (I very vaguely think _what_) about Dante--some
desperate splash I know I made for the beginning of my picture, as
when a painter at his wits' end and hunger's beginning says 'Here
shall the figure's han