ough all the
Carpaccios in Venice till they find me!

Love me a little more if possible while I am so long absent from you! What
I do and what I think go so much together now, that you will take what I
write as the most of me that it is possible to cram in, coming back to you
to share everything.

Under such an Italian sky as to-day how I would like to see your face!
Here, dearest, among these palaces you would be in your peerage, for I
think you have some southern blood in you.

Curious that, with all my fairness, somebody said to me to-day, "But you
are not quite English, are you?" And I swore by the nine gods of my
ancestry that I was nothing else. But the look is in us: my father had a
foreign air, but made up for it by so violent a patriotism that Uncle N.
used to call him "John Bull let loose."

My love to England. Is it showing much autumn yet? My eyes long for green
fields again. Since I have been in Italy I had not seen one until the
other day from the top of St. Giorgio Maggiore, where one lies in hiding
under the monastery walls.

All that I see now quickens me to fresh thoughts of you. Yet do not expect
me to come back wiser: my last effort at wisdom was to fall in love with
you, and there I stopped for good and all. There I am still, everything
included: what do you want more? My letter and my heart both threaten to
be over-weight, so no more of them this time. Most dearly do I love you.

LETTER XL.

Beloved: If two days slip by, I don't know where I am when I come to
write; things get so crowded in such a short space of time. Where I left
off I know not: I will begin where I am most awake--your letter which I
have just received.

That is well, dearest, that is well indeed: a truce till February! And
since the struggle then must needs be a sharp one--with only one end, as
we know,--do not vex her now by any overt signs of preparation as if you
assumed already that her final arguments were to be as so much chaff
before the wind. You do not tell me _what_ she argues, and I do not ask.
She does not say I shall not love you enough!

To answer businesslike to your questions first: with your forgiveness we
stay here till the 25th, and get back to England with the last of the
month. Does that seem a very cruel, far-off date? Others have the wish to
stay even longer, and it would be no fairness to hurry them beyond a
certain degree of reasonableness with my particular reason for
impatience, seein