never have mocked you or
myself by affecting to pass them over ... what _were_ obstacles, I
mean: but you _do_ see them, I must think,--and perhaps they strike me
the more from my true, honest unfeigned inability to imagine what they
are,--not that I shall endeavour. After what you _also_ apprise me of,
I know and am joyfully confident that if ever they cease to be what
you now consider them, you who see now _for me_, whom I implicitly
trust in to see for me; you will _then_, too, see and remember me, and
how I trust, and shall then be still trusting. And until you so see,
and so inform me, I shall never utter a word--for that would involve
the vilest of implications. I thank God--I _do_ thank him, that in
this whole matter I have been, to the utmost of my power, not unworthy
of his introducing you to me, in this respect that, being no longer in
the first freshness of life, and having for many years now made up my
mind to the impossibility of loving any woman ... having wondered at
this in the beginning, and fought not a little against it, having
acquiesced in it at last, and accounted for it all to myself, and
become, if anything, rather proud of it than sorry ... I say, when
real love, making itself at once recognized as such, _did_ reveal
itself to me at last, I _did_ open my heart to it with a cry--nor care
for its overturning all my theory--nor mistrust its effect upon a mind
set in ultimate order, so I fancied, for the few years more--nor
apprehend in the least that the new element would harm what was
already organized without its help. Nor have I, either, been guilty of
the more pardonable folly, of treating the new feeling after the
pedantic fashions and instances of the world. I have not spoken when
_it_ did not speak, because 'one' might speak, or has spoken, or
_should_ speak, and 'plead' and all that miserable work which, after
all, I may well continue proud that I am not called to attempt. _Here_
for instance, _now_ ... 'one' should despair; but 'try again' first,
and work blindly at removing those obstacles (--if I saw them, I
should be silent, and only speak when a month hence, ten years hence,
I could bid you look where they _were_)--and 'one' would do all this,
not for the _play-acting's_ sake, or to 'look the character' ...
(_that_ would be something quite different from folly ...) but from a
not unreasonable anxiety lest by too sudden a silence, too complete an
acceptance of your will; the earnestness