ew Romances and
Lyrics, and Lays and Plays, and read them and heed them and end them
and mend them!

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Thursday.
[Post-mark, May 16, 1845.]

But how 'mistrustfulness'? And how 'that way?' What have I said or
done, _I_, who am not apt to _be_ mistrustful of anybody and should be
a miraculous monster if I began with _you_! What can I have said, I
say to myself again and again.

One thing, at any rate, I have done, 'that way' or this way! I have
made what is vulgarly called a 'piece of work' about little; or seemed
to make it. Forgive me. I am shy by nature:--and by position and
experience, ... by having had my nerves shaken to excess, and by
leading a life of such seclusion, ... by these things together and by
others besides, I have appeared shy and ungrateful to you. Only not
mistrustful. You could not mean to judge me so. Mistrustful people do
not write as I write, surely! for wasn't it a Richelieu or Mazarin (or
who?) who said that with five lines from anyone's hand, he could take
off his head for a corollary? I think so.

Well!--but this is to prove that I am not mistrustful, and to say,
that if you care to come to see me you can come; and that it is my
gain (as I feel it to be) and not yours, whenever you do come. You
will not talk of having come afterwards I know, because although I am
'fast bound' to see one or two persons this summer (besides yourself,
whom I receive of choice and willingly) I _cannot_ admit visitors in a
general way--and putting the question of health quite aside, it would
be unbecoming to lie here on the sofa and make a company-show of an
infirmity, and hold a beggar's hat for sympathy. I should blame it in
another woman--and the sense of it has had its weight with me
sometimes.

For the rest, ... when you write, that _I_ do not know how you would
value, &c. _nor yourself quite_, you touch very accurately on the
truth ... and _so_ accurately in the last clause, that to read it,
made me smile 'tant bien que mal.' Certainly you cannot 'quite know,'
or know at all, whether the least straw of pleasure can go to you from
knowing me otherwise than on this paper--and I, for my part, 'quite
know' my own honest impression, dear Mr. Browning, that none is likely
to go to you. There is nothing to see in me; nor to hear in me--I
never learnt to talk as you do in London; although I can admire that
brightness of c