_all_ pleasure. But the best part of my life is the excitement of
arrivals from England. Reading all the news, written and printed, is
like living another life quite separate from this one. The old
letters are strange--very, when I begin to read them, but quite
familiar notwithstanding. So are all the books and newspapers,
though I never see a human being to whom it would ever occur to me to
mention anything I read in them. I see your _nom de guerre_ in them
sometimes. I saw a criticism on the preface to the second edition of
_Wuthering Heights_. I saw it among the notables who attended
Thackeray's lectures. I have seen it somehow connected with Sir J.
K. Shuttleworth. Did he want to marry you, or only to lionise you?
_or was it somebody else_?

'Your life in London is a "new country" to me, which I cannot even
picture to myself. You seem to like it--at least some things in it,
and yet your late letters to Mrs. J. Taylor talk of low spirits and
illness. "What's the matter with you now?" as my mother used to say,
as if it were the twentieth time in a fortnight. It is really
melancholy that now, in the prime of life, in the flush of your
hard-earned prosperity, you can't be well. Did not Miss Martineau
improve you? If she did, why not try her and her plan again? But I
suppose if you had hope and energy to try, you would be well. Well,
it's nearly dark and you will surely be well when you read this, so
what's the use of writing? I should like well to have some details
of your life, but how can I hope for it? I have often tried to give
you a picture of mine, but I have not the skill. I get a heap of
details, mostly paltry in themselves, and not enough to give you an
idea of the whole. Oh, for one hour's talk! You are getting too far
off and beginning to look strange to me. Do you look as you used to
do, I wonder? What do you and Ellen Nussey talk about when you meet?
There! it's dark.

'_Sunday night_.--I have let the vessel go that was to take this. As
there were others going soon I did not much care. I am in the height
of cogitation whether to send for some worsted stockings, etc. They
will come next year at this time, and who can tell what I shall want
then, or shall be doing? Yet hitherto we have sent such orders, and
have guessed or known pretty well