make you smile half.

Yet indeed I did not fancy that I was to love _you_ when you came to
see me--no indeed ... any more than I did your caring on your side. My
ambition when we began our correspondence, was simply that you should
forget I was a woman (being weary and _blasee_ of the empty written
gallantries, of which I have had my share and all the more perhaps
from my peculiar position which made them so without consequence),
that you should forget _that_ and let us be friends, and consent to
teach me what you knew better than I, in art and human nature, and
give me your sympathy in the meanwhile. I am a great hero-worshipper
and had admired your poetry for years, and to feel that you liked to
write to me and be written to was a pleasure and a pride, as I used
to tell you I am sure, and then your letters were not like other
letters, as I must not tell you again. Also you _influenced_ me, in a
way in which no one else did. For instance, by two or three half words
you made me see you, and other people had delivered orations on the
same subject quite without effect. I surprised everybody in this house
by consenting to see you. Then, when you came, you never went away. I
mean I had a sense of your presence constantly. Yes ... and to prove
how free that feeling was from the remotest presentiment of what has
occurred, I said to Papa in my unconsciousness the next morning ...
'it is most extraordinary how the idea of Mr. Browning does beset
me--I suppose it is not being used to see strangers, in some
degree--but it haunts me ... it is a persecution.' On which he smiled
and said that 'it was not grateful to my friend to use such a word.'
When the letter came....

Do you know that all that time I was frightened of you? frightened in
this way. I felt as if you had a power over me and meant to use it,
and that I could not breathe or speak very differently from what you
chose to make me. As to my thoughts, I had it in my head somehow that
you read _them_ as you read the newspaper--examined them, and fastened
them down writhing under your long entomological pins--ah, do you
remember the entomology of it all?

But the power was used upon _me_--and I never doubted that you had
mistaken your own mind, the strongest of us having some exceptional
weakness. Turning the wonder round in all lights, I came to what you
admitted yesterday ... yes, I saw _that_ very early ... that you had
come here with the intention of trying to love w