But the life thus gained was, in the immediate future, full of problems. Browning, said Kenyon, was "great in everything"; and during the year which followed their engagement he had occasion to exhibit the capacities both of the financier he had once declined to be, and of the diplomatist he was willing to become. Love had flung upon his life, as upon hers, a sudden splendour for which he was in no way prepared. "My whole scheme of life," he wrote to her,[30] "(with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down), was long ago calculated--and it supposed _you_, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible." But his schemes for a profession and an income were summarily cut short. Elizabeth Barrett peremptorily declined to countenance any such sacrifice of the work he was called to for any other. The same deep sense of what was due to him, and to his wife, sustained her through the trial that remained,--from the apparent degradation of secrecy and subterfuge which the domestic policy of Mr Barrett made inevitable, to the mere physical and nervous strain of rising, that September morning of 1846, from an invalid's couch to be married. That "peculiarity," as she gently termed it, of her father's, malign and cruel as it was, twice precipitated a happy crisis in their fortunes, which prudence might have postponed. His refusal to allow her to seek health in Italy in Oct. 1845 had brought them definitely together; his second refusal in Aug. 1846 drove her to the one alternative of going there as Browning's wife. A week after the marriage ceremony, during which they never met, Mrs Browning left her home, with the faithful Wilson and the indispensable Flush, _en route_ for Southampton. The following day they arrived in Paris. [Footnote 30: _R.B. to E.B.B._, Sept. 13, 1845.] II. There followed fifteen years during which the inexhaustible correspondents of the last twenty months exchanged no further letter, for they were never parted. That is the sufficient outward symbol of their all but flawless union. After a leisurely journey through France, and an experimental sojourn at the goal of Mrs Browning's two frustrated journeys, Pisa, they settled towards the close of April 1847 in furnished apartments in Florence, moving some four months later into the more permanent home which their presence was to render famous, the Palazzo (or "Casa") Guidi, just off the Piazza Pitti.