I have begun
to keep the house very tidy; it makes it less desolate. I take great
interest in my trade--as much as I could do in anything that was not
_all_ pleasure. But the best part of my life is the excitement of
arrivals from England. Reading all the news, written and printed, is
like living another life quite separate from this one. The old
letters are strange--very, when I begin to read them, but quite
familiar notwithstanding. So are all the books and newspapers,
though I never see a human being to whom it would ever occur to me to
mention anything I read in them. I see your _nom de guerre_ in them
sometimes. I saw a criticism on the preface to the second edition of
_Wuthering Heights_. I saw it among the notables who attended
Thackeray's lectures. I have seen it somehow connected with Sir J.
K. Shuttleworth. Did he want to marry you, or only to lionise you?
_or was it somebody else_?
'Your life in London is a "new country" to me, which I cannot even
picture to myself. You seem to like it--at least some things in it,
and yet your late letters to Mrs. J. Taylor talk of low spirits and
illness. "What's the matter with you now?" as my mother used to say,
as if it were the twentieth time in a fortnight. It is really
melancholy that now, in the prime of life, in the flush of your
hard-earned prosperity, you can't be well.
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