d deserved it.

Shall I tell you besides?--The first moment in which I seemed to admit
to myself in a flash of lightning the _possibility_ of your affection
for me being more than dream-work ... the first moment was _that_ when
you intimated (as you have done since repeatedly) that you cared for
me not for a reason, but because you cared for me. Now such a
'parceque' which reasonable people would take to be irrational, was
just the only one fitted to the uses of my understanding on the
particular question we were upon ... just the 'woman's reason'
suitable to the woman ...; for I could understand that it might be as
you said, and, if so, that it was altogether unanswerable ... do you
see? If a fact includes its own cause ... why there it stands for
ever--one of 'earth's immortalities'--_as long as it includes it_.

And when unreasonableness stands for a reason, it is a promising state
of things, we may both admit, and proves what it would be as well not
too curiously to enquire into. But then ... to look at it in a
brighter aspect, ... I do remember how, years ago, when talking the
foolishnesses which women will talk when they are by themselves, and
not forced to be sensible, ... one of my friends thought it 'safest to
begin with a little aversion,' and another, wisest to begin with a
great deal of esteem, and how the best attachments were produced so
and so, ... I took it into my head to say that the best was where
there was no cause at all for it, and the more wholly unreasonable,
the better still; that the motive should lie in the feeling itself and
not in the object of it--and that the affection which could (if it
could) throw itself out on an idiot with a goitre would be more
admirable than Abelard's. Whereupon everybody laughed, and someone
thought it affected of me and no true opinion, and others said plainly
that it was immoral, and somebody else hoped, in a sarcasm, that I
meant to act out my theory for the advantage of the world. To which I
replied quite gravely that I had not virtue enough--and so, people
laughed as it is fair to laugh when other people are esteemed to talk
nonsense. And all this came back to me in the south wind of your
'parceque,' and I tell it as it came ... now.

Which proves, if it proves anything, ... while I have every sort of
natural pleasure in your praises and like you to like my poetry just
as I should, and perhaps more than I should; yet _why_ it is all
behind ... and in its pl