with the whirlpool mark of your thumb quite
clear on it,--delicious to rest my face against and feel _you_ there.)

And so back to my spring weather: all in a moment you gave me a whole
week of the weather I had longed after. For you say the sun has been
shining on you: and I would rather have it there than here if it refuses
to be in two places at once. Also my letters have pleased you. When they
do, I feel such a proud mother to them! Here they fly quick out of the
nest; but I think sometimes they must come to you broken-winged, with
so much meant and all so badly put.

How can we ever, with our poor handful of senses, contrive to express
ourselves perfectly? Perhaps,--I don't know:--dearest, I love you! I
kiss you a hundred times to the minute. If everything in the world were
dark round us, could not kisses tell us quite well all that we wish to
know of each other?--me that you were true and brave and so beautiful
that a woman must be afraid looking at you:--and you that I was just my
very self,--loving and--no! just loving: I have no room for anything
more! You have swallowed up all my moral qualities, I have none left: I
am a beggar, where it is so sweet to beg.--Give me back crumbs of
myself! I am so hungry, I cannot show it, only by kissing you a hundred
times.

Dear share of the world, what a wonderful large helping of it you are to
me! I alter Portia's complaint and swear that "my little body is
bursting with this great world." And now it is written and I look at it,
it seems a Budge and Toddy sort of complaint. I do thank Heaven that the
Godhead who rules in it for us does not forbid the recognition of the
ludicrous! C---- was telling me how long ago, in her own dull Protestant
household, she heard a riddle propounded by some indiscreet soul who did
not understand the prudish piety which reigned there: and saw such
shocked eyes opening all round on the sound of it. "What is it," was
asked, "that a common man can see every day but that God never sees?"
"His equal" is the correct answer: but even so demure and proper a
support to thistly theology was to the ears that heard it as the hand of
Uzzah stretched out intrusively and deserving to be smitten. As for
C----, a twinkle of wickedness seized her, she hazarded "A joke" to be
the true answer, and was ordered into banishment by the head of that
God-fearing household for having so successfully diagnosed the family
skeleton.

As for skeletons, why your letter