or playing at fox and goose ... only there is no fox,
and I will not agree to be goose for one ... _that_ is _you_ perhaps,
for being 'too easily' satisfied.

So my claim is that you are more to me than I can be to you at any
rate. Mr. Fox said on Sunday that I was a 'religious hermit' who wrote
'poems which ought to be read in a Gothic alcove'; and religious
hermits, when they care to see visions, do it better, they all say,
through fasting and flagellation and seclusion in dark places. St.
Theresa, for instance, saw a clearer glory by such means, than your
Sir Moses Montefiore through his hundred-guinea telescope. Think then,
how every shadow of my life has helped to throw out into brighter,
fuller significance, the light which comes to me from you ... think
how it is the one light, seen without distractions.

_I_ was thinking the other day that certainly and after all (or rather
before all) I had loved you all my life unawares, that is, the idea of
you. Women begin for the most part, (if ever so very little given to
reverie) by meaning, in an aside to themselves, to love such and such
an ideal, seen sometimes in a dream and sometimes in a book, and
forswearing their ancient faith as the years creep on. I say a book,
because I remember a friend of mine who looked everywhere for the
original of Mr. Ward's 'Tremaine,' because nothing would do for _her_,
she insisted, except just _that_ excess of so-called refinement, with
the book-knowledge and the conventional manners, (_loue qui peut_,
Tremaine), and ended by marrying a lieutenant in the Navy who could
not spell. Such things happen every day, and cannot be otherwise, say
the wise:--and _this_ being otherwise with _me_ is miraculous
compensation for the trials of many years, though such abundant,
overabundant compensation, that I cannot help fearing it is too much,
as I know that you are too good and too high for me, and that by the
degree in which I am raised up you are let down, for us two to find a
level to meet on. One's ideal must be above one, as a matter of
course, you know. It is as far as one can reach with one's eyes
(soul-eyes), not reach to touch. And here is mine ... shall I tell
you? ... even to the visible outward sign of the black hair and the
complexion (why you might ask my sisters!) yet I would not tell you,
if I could not tell you afterwards that, if it had been red hair
quite, it had been the same thing, only I prove the coincidence out
fully and