except just that excess of so-called refinement, with the book-knowledge and the conventional manners, (loue qui peut, Tremaine), and ended by marrying a lieutenant in the Navy who could not spell.  Such things happen every day, and cannot be otherwise, say the wise:—­and this being otherwise with me is miraculous compensation for the trials of many years, though such abundant, overabundant compensation, that I cannot help fearing it is too much, as I know that you are too good and too high for me, and that by the degree in which I am raised up you are let down, for us two to find a level to meet on.  One’s ideal must be above one, as a matter of course, you know.  It is as far as one can reach with one’s eyes (soul-eyes), not reach to touch.  And here is mine ... shall I tell you? ... even to the visible outward sign of the black hair and the complexion (why you might ask my sisters!) yet I would not tell you, if I could not tell you afterwards that, if it had been red hair quite, it had been the same thing, only I prove the coincidence out fully and make you smile half.

Yet indeed I did not fancy that I was to love you when you came to see me—­no indeed ... any more than I did your caring on your side.  My ambition when we began our correspondence, was simply that you should forget I was a woman (being weary and blasee of the empty written gallantries, of which I have had my share and all the more perhaps from my peculiar position which made them so without consequence), that you should forget that and let us be friends, and consent to teach me what you knew better than I, in art and human nature, and give me your sympathy in the meanwhile.  I am a great hero-worshipper and had admired your poetry for years, and to feel that you liked to write to me and be written to was a pleasure and a pride, as I used to tell you I am sure, and then your letters were not like other letters, as I must not tell you again.  Also you influenced me, in a way in which no one else did.  For instance, by two or three half words you made me see you, and other people had delivered orations on the same subject quite without effect.  I surprised everybody in this house by consenting to see you.  Then, when you came, you never went away.  I mean I had a sense of your presence constantly.  Yes ... and to prove how free that feeling was from the remotest presentiment of what has occurred, I said to Papa in my unconsciousness the next morning ... ’it is most extraordinary how the idea of Mr. Browning does beset me—­I suppose it is not being used to see strangers, in some degree—­but it haunts me ... it is a persecution.’  On which he smiled and said that ‘it was not grateful to my friend to use such a word.’  When the letter came....

Do you know that all that time I was frightened of you? frightened in this way.  I felt as if you had a power over me and meant to use it, and that I could not breathe or speak very differently from what you chose to make me.  As to my thoughts, I had it in my head somehow that you read them as you read the newspaper—­examined them, and fastened them down writhing under your long entomological pins—­ah, do you remember the entomology of it all?