To Mrs. Martin Monday, July 29, 1845 [postmark].

My dearest Mrs. Martin,—­I am ashamed not to have written before, and yet have courage enough to ask you to write to me as soon as you can.  Day by day I have had good intentions enough (the fact is) about writing, to seem to deserve some good deeds from you, which is contrary to all wisdom and reason, I know, but is rather natural, after all.  What my deeds have been, you will be apt to ask.  Why, all manner of idleness, which is the most interrupting, you know, of all things.  The Hedleys have been flitting backwards and forwards, staying, some of them, for a month at a time in London, and then going, and then coming again; and I have had other visitors, few but engrossing ‘after their kind.’  And I have been getting well—­which is a process—­going out into the carriage two or three times a week, abdicating my sofa for my armchair, moving from one room to another now and then, and walking about mine quite as well as, and with considerably more complacency than, a child of two years old.  Altogether, I do think that if you were kind enough to be glad to see me looking better when you were in London, you would be kind enough to be still gladder if you saw me now.  Everybody praises me, and I look in the looking-glass with a better conscience.  Also, it is an improving improvement, and will be, until, you know, the last hem of the garment of summer is lost sight of, and then—­and then—­I must either follow to another climate, or be ill again—­that I know, and am prepared for.  It is but dreary work, this undoing of my Penelope web in the winter, after the doing of it through the summer, and the more progress one makes in one’s web, the more dreary the prospect of the undoing of all these fine silken stitches.  But we shall see....

Ever your affectionate
BA.

To Mrs. Martin Tuesday [October 1845].

My dearest Mrs. Martin,—­Do believe that I have not been, as I have seemed, perhaps, forgetful of you through this silence.  This last proof of your interest and affection for me—­in your letter to Henrietta—­quite rouses me to speak out my remembrance of you, and I have been remembering you all the time that I did not speak, only I was so perplexed and tossed up and down by doubts and sadnesses as to require some shock from without to force the speech from me.  Your verses, in their grace of kindness, and the ivy from Wordsworth’s cottage, just made me think to myself that I would write to you before I left England, but when you talk really of coming to see me, why, I must speak!  You overcome me with the sense of your goodness to me.