Beloved: If two days slip by, I don't know where I am when I come to
write; things get so crowded in such a short space of time. Where I left
off I know not: I will begin where I am most awake your letter which I
have just received.
That is well, dearest, that is well indeed: a truce till February! And
since the struggle then must needs be a sharp one with only one end, as
we know, do not vex her now by any overt signs of preparation as if you
assumed already that her final arguments were to be as so much chaff
before the wind. You do not tell me what she argues, and I do not ask.
She does not say I shall not love you enough!
To answer businesslike to your questions first: with your forgiveness we
stay here till the 25th, and get back to England with the last of the
month. Does that seem a very cruel, far-off date? Others have the wish to
stay even longer, and it would be no fairness to hurry them beyond a
certain degree of reasonableness with my particular reason for
impatience, seeing, moreover, that in your love I have every help for
remaining patient. It is too much to hope, I suppose, that the "truce"
sets you free now, and that you could meet us here after all, and prolong
our stay indefinitely? I know one besides myself who would be glad, and
would welcome an outside excuse dearly.
For, oh, the funniness of near and dear things! Arthur's heart is laid
up with a small love affair, and it is the comicalest of internal
maladies. He is screwing up courage to tell me all about it, and I write
in haste before my mouth is sealed by his confidences. I fancy I know
the party, an energetic little mortal whom we met at Lucerne, where
Arthur lingered while we came on to Florence. She talked vaguely of
being in Venice some time this autumn; and the vagueness continues.
Arthur, in consequence, roams round disconsolately with no interest but
in hotel books. And for fear lest we should gird up his loins and drag
him away with us out of Paradisal possibilities, he is forever praising
Venice as a resting-place, and saying he wants to be nowhere else. The
bathing just keeps him alive; but when put to it to explain what charms
him since pictures do not, and architecture only slightly, he says in
exemplary brotherly fashion that he likes to see me completing my
education and enthusiasms, and does not realize with how foreign an
air that explanation sits upon his shoulders.
I saw to-day a remnant of your patron saint, and for your sake
transferred a kiss to it, Italian fashion, with my thumb and the sign of
the cross. I hope it will do you good. Also, I have been up among the
galleries of St. Mark's, and about the roof and the west front where
somebody or another painted his picture of the bronze horses.
The pigeons get to recognize people personally, and grow more intimate
every time we come. I even conceive they make favorites, for I had three
pecking food out of my mouth to-day and refusing to take it in any other
fashion, and they coo and say thank you before and after every seed they
take or spill. They are quite the pleasantest of all the Italian
beggars and the cleanest.
Your friend pressed us in to tea yesterday: I think less for the sake of
giving us tea than that we should see his palace, or rather his first
floor, in which alone he seems to lose himself. I have no idea for
measurements, but I imagine his big sala is about eighty feet long and
perhaps twenty-five feet across, with a flat-beamed roof, windows at
each end, and portières along the walls of old blue Venetian linen: a
place in which it seems one could only live and think nobly. His face
seems to respond to its teachings. What more might not an environment
like that bring out in you? Come and let me see! I have hopes springing
as I think of things that you may be coming after all; and that that is
what lay concealed under the gayety of your last paragraph. Then I am
more blessed even than I knew. What, you are coming? So well I do love
you, my Beloved!
continued below....
