And now I will tell you.  It is nearly two years ago since I have known Mr. Browning.  Mr. Kenyon wished to bring him to see me five years ago, as one of the lions of London who roared the gentlest and was best worth my knowing; but I refused then, in my blind dislike to seeing strangers.  Immediately, however, after the publication of my last volumes, he wrote to me, and we had a correspondence which ended in my agreeing to receive him as I never had received any other man.  I did not know why, but it was utterly impossible for me to refuse to receive him, though I consented against my will.  He writes the most exquisite letters possible, and has a way of putting things which I have not, a way of putting aside—­so he came.  He came, and with our personal acquaintance began his attachment for me, a sort of infatuation call it, which resisted the various denials which were my plain duty at 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.