e next ... which is
nowhere, seeing it is not in the letter. Quite otherwise in personal
intercourse, where any indication of turning to a certain path, even,
might possibly be checked not for its own fault but lest, the path
once reached and proceeded in, some other forbidden turning might come
into sight, we will say. In the letter, all ended _there_, just there
... and you may think of that, and forgive; at all events, may avoid
speaking irrevocable words--and when, as to me, those words are
intensely _true, doom-words_--think, dearest! Because, as I told you
once, what most characterizes my feeling for you is the perfect
_respect_ in it, the full _belief_ ... (I shall get presently to poor
Robert's very avowal of 'owing you all esteem'!). It is on that I
build, and am secure--for how should I know, of myself, how to serve
you and be properly yours if it all was to be learnt by my own
interpreting, and what you professed to dislike you were to be
considered as wishing for, and what liking, as it seemed, you were
loathing at your heart, and if so many 'noes' made a 'yes,' and 'one
refusal no rebuff' and all that horrible bestiality which stout
gentlemen turn up the whites of their eyes to, when they rise after
dinner and pressing the right hand to the left side say, 'The toast be
dear woman!' Now, love, with this feeling in me from the beginning,--I
do believe,--_now_, when I am utterly blest in this gift of your love,
and least able to imagine what I should do without it,--I cannot but
believe, I say, that had you given me once a 'refusal'--clearly
derived from your own feelings, and quite apart from any fancied
consideration for my interests; had this come upon me, whether slowly
but inevitably in the course of events, or suddenly as precipitated by
any step of mine; I should, _believing you_, have never again renewed
directly or indirectly such solicitation; I should have begun to count
how many other ways were yet open to serve you and devote myself to
you ... but from _the outside_, now, and not in your livery! Now, if I
should have acted thus under _any_ circumstances, how could I but
redouble my endeavours at precaution after my own foolish--you know,
and forgave long since, and I, too, am forgiven in my own eyes, for
the cause, though not the manner--but could I do other than keep
'farther from you' than in the letters, dearest? For your own part in
that matter, seeing it with all the light you have since given