have been _getting well_--which
is a process--going out into the carriage two or three times a week,
abdicating my sofa for my armchair, moving from one room to another
now and then, and walking about mine quite as well as, and with
considerably more complacency than, a child of two years old.
Altogether, I do think that if you were kind enough to be glad to see
me looking better when you were in London, you would be kind enough to
be still gladder if you saw me now. Everybody praises me, and I
look in the looking-glass with a better conscience. Also, it is an
improving improvement, and will be, until, you know, the last hem of
the garment of summer is lost sight of, and then--and then--I must
either follow to another climate, or be ill again--_that_ I know, and
am prepared for. It is but dreary work, this undoing of my Penelope
web in the winter, after the doing of it through the summer, and the
more progress one makes in one's web, the more dreary the prospect of
the undoing of all these fine silken stitches. But we shall see....

Ever your affectionate
BA.

_To Mrs. Martin_
Tuesday [October 1845].

My dearest Mrs. Martin,--Do believe that I have not been, as I have
seemed, perhaps, forgetful of you through this silence. This last
proof of your interest and affection for me--in your letter to
Henrietta--quite rouses me to _speak out_ my remembrance of you, and
I have been remembering you all the time that I did not speak, only I
was so perplexed and tossed up and down by doubts and sadnesses as
to require some shock from without to force the speech from me. Your
verses, in their grace of kindness, and the ivy from Wordsworth's
cottage, just made me think to myself that I would write to you before
I left England, but when you talk really of coming to see me, why, I
must speak! You overcome me with the sense of your goodness to me.

Yet, after all, I will not have you come! The farewells are bad enough
which come to us, without our going to seek them, and I would rather
wait and meet you on the Continent, or in England again, than see you
now, just to part from you. And you cannot guess how shaken I am, and
how I cling to every plank of a little calm. Perhaps I am going on the
17th or 20th. Certainly I have made up my mind to do it, and shall do
it as a bare matter of duty; and it is one of the most painful acts
of duty which my whole life has set before me. The road is as rough as
possible, as far as I can see