irrelevant? Which I say from no
want of sensibility to the words of it--your words always make
themselves felt--but in fulness of purpose not to suffer you to hold
to words because they have been said, nor to say them as if to be
holden by them. Why, if a thousand more such words were said by you to
me, how could they operate upon the future or present, supposing me to
choose to keep the possible modification of your feelings, as a
probability, in my sight and yours? Can you help my sitting with the
doors all open if I think it right? I do attest to you--while I trust
you, as you must see, in word and act, and while I am confident that
no human being ever stood higher or purer in the eyes of another, than
you do in mine,--that you would still stand high and remain
unalterably my friend, if the probability in question became a fact,
as now at this moment. And this I must say, since you have said other
things: and this alone, which _I_ have said, concerns the future, I
remind you earnestly.

My dearest friend--you have followed the most _generous_ of impulses
in your whole bearing to me--and I have recognised and called by its
name, in my heart, each one of them. Yet I cannot help adding that, of
us two, yours has not been quite the hardest part ... I mean, to a
generous nature like your own, to which every sort of nobleness comes
easily. Mine has been more difficult--and I have sunk under it again
and again: and the sinking and the effort to recover the duty of a
lost position, may have given me an appearance of vacillation and
lightness, unworthy at least of _you_, and perhaps of both of us.
Notwithstanding which appearance, it was right and just (only just) of
you, to believe in me--in my truth--because I have never failed to you
in it, nor been capable of _such_ failure: the thing I have said, I
have meant ... always: and in things I have not said, the silence has
had a reason somewhere different perhaps from where you looked for it.
And this brings me to complaining that you, who profess to believe in
me, do yet obviously believe that it was only merely silence, which I
required of you on one occasion--and that if I had 'known your power
over yourself,' I should not have minded ... no! In other words you
believe of me that I was thinking just of my own (what shall I call it
for a motive base and small enough?) my own scrupulousness ... freedom
from embarrassment! of myself in the least of me; in the tying of my
sho