in the meanwhile, however, my case is not to be classed with other cases—­what happened to me could not have happened, perhaps, with any other family in England....  I hate and loathe everything too which is clandestine—­we both do, Robert and I; and the manner the whole business was carried on in might have instructed the least acute of the bystanders.  The flowers standing perpetually on my table for the last two years were brought there by one hand, as everybody knew; and really it would have argued an excess of benevolence in an unmarried man with quite enough resources in London, to pay the continued visits he paid to me without some strong motive indeed.  Was it his fault that he did not associate with everybody in the house as well as with me?  He desired it; but no—­that was not to be.  The endurance of the pain of the position was not the least proof of his attachment to me.  How I thank you for believing in him—­how grateful it makes me!  He will justify to the uttermost that faith.  We have been married two months, and every hour has bound me to him more and more; if the beginning was well, still better it is now—­that is what he says to me, and I say back again day by day.  Then it is an ‘advantage,’ to have an inexhaustible companion who talks wisdom of all things in heaven and earth, and shows besides as perpetual a good humour and gaiety as if he were—­a fool, shall I say? or a considerable quantity more, perhaps.  As to our domestic affairs, it is not to my honour and glory that the ‘bills’ are made up every week and paid more regularly ‘than hard beseems,’ while dear Mrs. Jameson laughs outright at our miraculous prudence and economy, and declares that it is past belief and precedent that we should not burn the candles at both ends, and the next moment will have it that we remind her of the children in a poem of Heine’s who set up housekeeping in a tub, and inquired gravely the price of coffee.  Ah, but she has left Pisa at last—­left it yesterday.  It was a painful parting to everybody.  Seven weeks spent in such close neighbourhood—­a month of it under the same roof and in the same carriages—­will fasten people together, and then travelling shakes them together.  A more affectionate, generous woman never lived than Mrs. Jameson, and it is pleasant to be sure that she loves us both from her heart, and not only du bout des levres.  Think of her making Robert promise (as he has told me since) that in the case of my being unwell he would write to her instantly, and she would come at once if anywhere in Italy.  So kind, so like her.  She spends the winter in Rome, but an intermediate month at Florence, and we are to keep tryst with her somewhere in the spring, perhaps at Venice.  If not, she says that she will come back here, for that certainly she will see us.  She would have stayed altogether perhaps, if it had not been for her book upon art which she is engaged to bring out next year, and the materials