How pleasant, dearest Mona Nina, to hear you, though the voice sounds far! Try and come back to us soon, and let us talk, or listen, rather, to your talking. Why shouldn't _I_, too, have a sister of charity, like others? I appeal to you. Still, I have only good to tell you of myself. I am better through the better weather and through our arrival in this apartment, where, as Robert says, we are as pleased as if we had never lived in a house before. Well, I assure you the rooms are perfect in comfort and convenience; not large, but _warm_, and of a number and arrangement which exclude all fault-finding. Clean, carpeted; no glitter, nothing very pretty--not even the clocks--but with sofas and chairs suited to lollers such as one of us, and altogether what I mean whenever I say that an 'apartment' on the Continent is twenty times more really 'comfortable' than any of your small houses in England. Robert has a room to himself too. It's perfect. I hop about from one side to the other, like a bird in a new cage. The feathers are draggled and rough, though. I am not strong, though the cough is quieter without the least doubt. And this time also I shall not die, perhaps. Indeed, I do think not. That darling Robert carried me into the carriage, swathed past possible breathing, over face and respirator in woollen shawls. No, he wouldn't set me down even to walk up the fiacre steps, but shoved me in upside down, in a struggling bundle--I struggling for breath--he accounting to the concierge for 'his murdered man' (rather woman) in a way which threw me into fits of laughter afterwards to remember. 'Elle se porte très bien! elle se porte extrêmement bien. Ce n'est rien que les poumons.' Nothing but lungs! No air in them, which was the worst! Think how the concierge must have wondered ever since about 'cet original d'Anglais,' and the peculiar way of treating wives when they are in excellent health. 'Sacre.' Kind Madame Mohl was here to-day, asking about you; and the Aides, male and female, whom we did not see, being at dinner; and dear Lady Elgin came to the door in her wheel-chair. We keep Penini (in a bed this time) in our bedroom. He was so pathetic about it, we would not lose him. Write to us, keep writing to us, till you come. I think much of you, wish much for you, and feel much _with_ you. May God bless you, my dear dear friend! The frost broke up on Thursday, and it is raining warmly to-day; but I can't believe in the possibility of the cold penetrating much into this house under worse circumstances; and I shall be bold, and try hard to begin writing next week. Oh! George Sand. How magnificent that eighteenth volume is; I mean the volume which concludes with the views upon the _sexes_! After all, and through all, if her hands are ever so defiled, that woman has a clean soul. On the magnetic subjects, too, her 'je ne sais' is worthy of her. And yet, more is to be known I am sure, than she knows.