As the very poorest proof of gratitude for your letter, Robert suggests that I should enclose this photograph of Penini and myself taken at Rome this last spring.  You will like to have them, we fancy, but it is Robert’s gift.  I was half inclined last year to send you a photograph from Field Talfourd’s picture of me,[91] but I shrank back, knowing that dear Mr. Martin would cry out at the flattery of it, which he well might do.  But this photograph from nature can’t be flattered, so I hazard it.  You see the locks are dark still, not white, and the sun, in spite, has blackened the face to complete the harmony.  Pen is very like, and very sweet we think.

Do, when you write, speak of yourself—­yourselves.  I hope you like the ‘Mill on the Floss.’

Our love to dearest Mr. Martin and you.

Let me be as ever,

Your affectionate and grateful
BA.

* * * * *

To Miss E.F.  Haworth

Villa Alberti, Siena, Sardegna:  August 25, [1860].

My dearest Fanny,—­I received your letter with thanks upon thanks.  It seemed long since I heard or wrote.  I have been very sad, very—­with a stone hung round my heart, and a black veil between me and all that I do, think, or look at.  One of my sisters is very ill in England—­my married sister—­an internal tumour, accompanied with considerable suffering, and doubtful enough as to its issue to keep us all (I can answer at least for myself) in great misery.  Robert says I exaggerate, and I think and know that consciously or unconsciously he wants to save me pain.  She went to London, and the medical man called it an anxious case.  We all know what that must mean.  For a little time I was in an anguish of fear, and though come to believe now that no great change any way is to be expected quickly, you would pity what I feel when the letters are at hand.  May God have mercy on us all!  I wanted at first to get to England, but everyone here and there was against it, and I suppose it would have been a pure selfishness on my part to persist in going, seeing that the fatigue and the cold in England alone would have broken me up to a faggot (though of not so much use as to burn) so that I should have complicated other people’s difficulties, without much mending my own.  Still it would have been comfort to me (however selfish) to have just held her hand.  But no.  Oh, I am resigned to its being wiser.  I am shaken, even at this distance.  She has three children younger than my Peni.  Don’t let me talk of it any more.

You see, Fanny, my ‘destiny’ has always been to be entirely useless to the people I should like to help (except to my little Pen sometimes in pushing him through his lessons, and even so the help seems doubtful, scholastically speaking, to Robert!) and to have only power at the end of my pen, and for the help of people I don’t care for.  At moments lately, thanks from a stranger for this or that have sounded ghastly to me who can’t go to smooth a pillow for my own darling sister.  Now, I won’t talk of it any more.  After all I try to be patient and wait quietly, and there ought to be hope and faith meantime.