i850 LETTER TO HIS SISTER 67 



I do not say the memory, knowing how impossible that would 

 be — of your great loss.* God knows, my dear sister, I could 

 feel for you. It was as if I could see again a shadow of the 

 great sorrow that fell upon us all years ago. 



Nothing can bind me more closely to your children than I 

 am already, but if the christening be not all over you must let 

 me be godfather ; and though I fear I am too much of a heretic 

 to promise to bring him up a good son of the church — yet. should 

 ever the position which you prophesy, and of which I have an 

 "Ahnung" (though I don't tell that to anybody but Nettie), 

 be mine, he shall (if you will trust him to me) be cared for 

 as few sons are. , As things stand, I am talking half nonsense, 

 but I mean it — and you know of oid, for good and for evil, my 

 tenacity of purpose. 



Now, as to my own affairs — I am not married. Prudently, 

 at any rate, but whether wisely or foolishly I am not quite sure 

 yet, Nettie and I resolved to have nothing to do with matrimony 

 for the present. In truth, though our marriage was my great 

 wish on many accounts, yet I feared to bring upon her the con- 

 sequences that might have occurred had anything happened to 

 me within the next few years. We had a sad parting enough, 

 and as is usually the case with me, time, instead of alleviating, 

 renders more disagreeable our separation. I have a woman's 

 element in me. I hate the incessant struggle and toil to cut one 

 another's throat among us men, and I long to be able to meet 

 with some one in whom I can place implicit confidence, whose 

 , judgment I can respect, and yet who will not laugh at my most 

 foolish weaknesses, and in whose love I can forget all care. All 

 these conditions I have fulfilled in Nettie. With a strong natu- 

 ral intelligence, and knowledge enough to understand and sym- 

 pathise with my aims, with firmness of a man, when necessary, 

 she combines the gentleness of a very woman and the honest 

 simplicity of a child, and then she loves me well, as well as I 

 love her, and you know I love but few — in the real meaning of 

 the word, perhaps, but two — she and you. And now she is 

 away, and you are away. The worst of it is I have no ambition, 

 except as means to an end, and that end is the possession of a 

 sufficient income to marry upon. I assure you I would not give 

 two straws for all the honours and titles in the world. A worker 

 I must always be — it is my nature — but if I had £400 a year I 

 would never let my name appear to anything I did or shall ever 



* The death of her little daughter Jessie. 



