s 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.

The pen-utilities themselves don't pass uncontested, as you observe.
Yes, I see the 'Spiritual Magazine,' and remarked how I was scourged in
the house of my friends. Robert shouted in triumph at it, and hoped I
was pleased, and as for myself, it really did make me smile a little,
which was an advantage, in the sad humour I was in at the time.
'Biologised by infernal spirits since "_Casa Guidi Windows_"' yet 'Casa
Guidi Windows' was not wholly vicious it seems to me, nor 'Aurora'
utterly corrupt. And Mr. Howitt is both a clever man, and an honest and
brave man, for all h