Do you read these jogged scrawls, I wonder. I think of your poor eyes, and resolve to tear what I have written up: then I look out at the ghostly country and the beautiful night, and I cannot bring myself to read a miserable book... Yes, as you guess, Ellen, I am having a bad attack of you just at present. I am restless; and a man's restlessness always means a woman; and my restlessness means Ellen. And your conduct is often shocking. Today I was wandering somewhere...when I glanced at a shop window; and there you were --- Oh disgraceful and abandoned --- in your third Act Sans Gene dress --- a mere waistband --- laughing wickedly, and saying maliciously: "Look here restless one, at your pillow, at what you are really thinking about." How can you look Window and Grove's camera in the face with such thoughts in your head and almost nothing on...

Oh fie, fie, let me get away from this stuff, which you have been listening to all your life, & despise --- though indeed, dearest Ellen, these silly longings stir up great waves of tenderness in which there is no guile.

Do you know, when you have told me to think of you, I have been feeling ashamed of thinking of you so much, of thinking of only you --- which is too much, perhaps. Shall I tell you? It seems to me, to myself, that no man was ever before to any woman what you are to me --- the fulness must be in proportion, you know, to the vacancy...and only I know what was behind --- the long wilderness without the blossoming rose...and the capacity for happiness, like a black gaping hole, before this silver flooding. Is it wonderful that I should stand as in a dream, and disbelieve --- not you --- but my own fate? Was ever any one taken suddenly from a lampless dungeon and placed upon the pinnacle of a mountain, without the head turning round and the heart turning faint, as mine do? And you love me more, you say? --- Shall I thank you or God? Both, --- indeed --- and there is no possible return from me to either of you! I thank you as the unworthy may... and as we all thank God. How shall I ever prove what my heart is to you? How will you ever see it as I feel it? I ask myself in vain. Have so much faith in me, my only beloved, as to use me simply for your own advantage and happiness, and to your own ends without a thought of any others --- that is all I could ask you without any disquiet as to the granting of it --- May God bless you!