I like an author who has the courage and self-restraint to leave his noble creations alive:  too many try to ennoble them by death.  For my part, if I have to go out of life before you, I would gladly trust you to the hands of Clara, or Rose, or Janet, or most of all Vittoria; though, to be accurate, I fear they have all grown too old for you by now.

And you? have you any men to offer me in turn out of your literary admirations, supposing you should die of a snapped ankle?  Would you give me to d’Artagnan for instance?  Hardly, I suspect!  But either choose me some proxy hero, or get well and come to me!  You will be very welcome when you do.  Sleep is making sandy eyes at me:  good-night, dearest.

LETTER XXII.

Why, my Beloved:  Since you put it to me as a point of conscience (it is only lying on your back with one active leg doing nothing, and the other dying to have done aching, which has made you take this new start of inquiring within upon everything), since you call on me for a conscientious answer, I say that it stands to reason that I love you more than you love me, because there is so much more of you to love, let alone fit for loving.

Do you imagine that you are going to be a cripple for life, and therefore an indifferent dancer in the dances I shall always be leading you, that you have started this fit of self-depreciation?  Or is it because I have thrown Meredith at your sick head that you doubt my tact and my affection, and my power patiently to bear for your sake a good deal of cold shoulder?  Dearest, remember I am doctoring you from a distance:  and am not yet allowed to come and see my patient, so can only judge from your letters how ill you are.  That you have been concealing from me almost treacherously:  and only by a piece of abject waylaying did I receive word to-day of your sleepless nights, and so get the key to your symptoms.  Lay by Meredith, then, for a while:  I am sending you a cargo of Stevenson instead.  You have been truly unkind, trying to read what required effort, when you were fit for nothing of the sort.

And lest even Stevenson should be too much for you, and wanting very much, and perhaps a little bit jealously, to be your most successful nurse, I am letting my last large bit of shyness of you go; and with a pleasant sort of pain, because I know I have hit on a thing that will please you, I open my hands and let you have these, and with them goes my last blush:  henceforth I am a woman without a secret, and all your interest in me may evaporate.  Yet I know well it will not.

As for this resurrection pie from love’s dead-letter office, you will find from it at least one thing—­how much I depended upon response from you before I could become at all articulate.  It is you, dearest, from the beginning who have set my head and heart free and made me a woman.  I am something quite different from the sort of child I was less than a year ago when I wrote that small prayer which stands sponsor for all that follows.  How abundantly it has been answered, dearest Beloved, only I know:  you do not!