one you will not refuse any love to the other when you come to know him.  I never could bear to speak to you of him since quite the beginning, or rather I never could dare.  But when you know him and understand how the mental gifts are scarcely half of him, you will not wonder at your friend, and, indeed, two years of steadfast affection from such a man would have, overcome any woman’s heart.  I have been neither much wiser nor much foolisher than all the shes in the world, only much happier—­the difference is in the happiness.  Certainly I am not likely to repent of having given myself to him.  I cannot, for all the pain received from another quarter, the comfort for which is that my conscience is pure of the sense of having broken the least known duty, and that the same consequence would follow any marriage of any member of my family with any possible man or woman.  I look to time, and reason, and natural love and pity, and to the justification of the events acting through all; I look on so and hope, and in the meanwhile it has been a great comfort to have had not merely the indulgence but the approbation and sympathy of most of my old personal friends—­oh, such kind letters; for instance, yesterday one came from dear Mrs. Martin, who has known me, she and her husband, since the very beginning of my womanhood, and both of them are acute, thinking people, with heads as strong as their hearts.  I in my haste left England without a word to them, for which they might naturally have reproached me; instead of which they write to say that never for a moment have they doubted my having acted for the best and happiest, and to assure me that, having sympathised with me in every sorrow and trial, they delightedly feel with me in the new joy; nothing could be more cordially kind.  See how I write to you as if I could speak—­all these little things which are great things when seen in the light.  Also R, and I are not in the least tired of one another notwithstanding the very perpetual tete-a-tete into which we have fallen, and which (past the first fortnight) would be rather a trial in many cases.  Then our housekeeping may end perhaps in being a proverb among the nations, for at the beginning it makes Mrs. Jameson laugh heartily.  It disappoints her theories, she admits—­finding that, albeit poets, we abstain from burning candles at both ends at once, just as if we did statistics and historical abstracts by nature instead.  And do not think that the trouble falls on me.  Even the pouring out of the coffee is a divided labour, and the ordering of the dinner is quite out of my hands.  As for me, when I am so good as to let myself be carried upstairs, and so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, and so considerate, moreover, as not to put my foot into a puddle, why my duty is considered done to a perfection which is worthy of all adoration; it really is not very hard work to please this taskmaster.  For Pisa, we both like it extremely.  The city is full of beauty and