Part 3 (2/2)

FLORENCE, _1st September_ (1874).

Don't be in despair about your book. I am sure it will be lovely. I'll see to it the moment I get home, but I've got into an entirely unexpected piece of business here, the interpretation of a large chapel[11] full of misunderstood, or not at all understood, frescoes; and I'm terribly afraid of breaking down, so much drawing has to be done at the same time. It has stranded botany and everything.

I was kept awake half of last night by drunken blackguards howling on the bridge of the Holy Trinity in the pure half-moonlight. This is the kind of discord I have to bear, corresponding to your uncongenial company. But, alas! Susie, you ought at ten years old to have more firmness, and to resolve that you won't be bored. I think I shall try to enforce it on you as a very solemn duty not to _lie_ to people as the vulgar public do. If they bore you, say so, and they'll go away.

That is the right state of things.

How am I to know that _I_ don't bore you, when _I_ come, when you're so civil to people you hate?

[Footnote 11: Spanish chapel in S. Maria Novella.]

Pa.s.s OF BOCCHETTA, _1st October_ (1874).

All that is lovely and wonderful in the Alps may be seen without the slightest danger, in general, and it is especially good for little girls of eleven who can't climb, to know this--all the best views of hills are at the bottom of them. I know one or two places indeed where there is a grand peeping over precipices, one or two where the mountain seclusion and strength are worth climbing to see. But all the entirely beautiful things I could show you, Susie; only for the very highest sublime of them sometimes asking you to endure half an hour of _chaise a porteurs_, but mostly from a post-chaise or smoothest of turnpike roads.

But, Susie, do you know, I'm greatly horrified at the penwipers of peac.o.c.ks' feathers! _I_ always use my left-hand coat-tail, indeed, and if only I were a peac.o.c.k and a pet of yours, how you'd scold me!

Sun just coming out over sea (at Sestri), which is sighing in towards the window, within your drive, round before the door's breadth of it,[12] seen between two ma.s.ses of acacia copse and two orange trees at the side of the inn courtyard.

[Footnote 12: That is, within that distance of the window.--J. R.]

GENEVA, _19th October_ (1874).

How I have been neglecting you! Perhaps Joanie may have told you that just at my last gasp of hand-work, I had to write quite an unexpected number of letters. But poor Joanie will think herself neglected now, for I have been stopped among the Alps by a state of their glaciers entirely unexampled, and shall be a week after my ”latest possible”

day, in getting home. It is eleven years since I was here, and very sad to me to return, yet delightful with a moonlight paleness of the past, precious of its kind.

I shall be at home with Joan in ten days now, G.o.d willing. I have much to tell you, which will give you pleasure and pain; but I don't know how much it will be--to tell you--for a little while yet, so I don't begin.

OXFORD, _26th October_ (1874).

Home at last with your lovely, most lovely, letter in my breast pocket.

I am so very grateful to you for not writing on black paper.

Oh, dear Susie, why should we ever wear black for the guests of G.o.d?

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