LETTER LV.

Beloved:  I am getting quite out of letter-writing, and it is your doing, not mine.  No sooner do I get a line from you than you rush over in person and take the answer to it out of my mouth!

I have had six from you in the last week, and believe I have only exchanged you one:  all the rest have been nipped in the bud by your arrivals.  My pen turns up a cross nose whenever it hears you coming now, and declares life so dull as not to be worth living.  Poor dinky little Othello! it shall have its occupation again to-day, and say just what it likes.

It likes you while you keep away:  so that’s said!  When I make it write “come,” it kicks and tries to say “don’t.”  For it is an industrious minion, loves to have work to do, and never complains of overhours.  It is a sentimental fact that I keep all its used-up brethren in an inclosure together, and throw none of them away.  If once they have ridden over paper to you, I turn them to grass in their old age.  I let this out because I think it is time you had another laugh at me.

Laugh, dearest, and tell me that you have done so if you want to make me a little more happy than I have been this last day or two.  There has been too much thinking in the heads of both of us.  Be empty-headed for once when you write next:  whether you write little or much, I am sure always of your full heart:  but I cannot trust your brain to the same pressure:  it is such a Martha to headaches and careful about so many things, and you don’t bring it here to be soothed as often as you should—­not at its most needy moments, I mean.

Have you made the announcement? or does it not go till to-day?  I am not sorry, since the move comes from her, that we have not to wait now till February.  You will feel better when the storm is up than when it is only looming.  This is the headachy period.

Well.  Say “well” with me, dearest!  It is going to be well:  waiting has not suited us—­not any of us, I think.  Your mother is one in a thousand, I say that and mean it:—­worth conquering as all good things are.  I would not wish great fortune to come by too primrosy a way.  “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?” Even so, for size, is the share of the world which we lay claim to, and for that we must be toilers of the deep.—­Always, Beloved, your truest and most loving.

LETTER LVI.

My Own Own Love:  You have given me a spring day before the buds begin,—­ the weather I have been longing for!  I had been quite sad at heart these cold wet days, really down;—­a treasonable sadness with you still anywhere in the world (though where in the world have you been?).  Spring seemed such a long way off over the bend of it, with you unable to come; and it seems now another letter of yours has got lost. (Write it again, dearest,—­all that was in it, with any blots that happened to come:—­there was a dear smudge in to-day’s, with the whirlpool mark of your thumb quite clear on it,—­delicious to rest my face against and feel you there.)