My dearest friend--you have followed the most _generous_ of impulses in your whole bearing to me--and I have recognised and called by its name, in my heart, each one of them. Yet I cannot help adding that, of us two, yours has not been quite the hardest part ... I mean, to a generous nature like your own, to which every sort of nobleness comes easily. Mine has been more difficult--and I have sunk under it again and again: and the sinking and the effort to recover the duty of a lost position, may have given me an appearance of vacillation and lightness, unworthy at least of _you_, and perhaps of both of us. Notwithstanding which appearance, it was right and just (only just) of you, to believe in me--in my truth--because I have never failed to you in it, nor been capable of _such_ failure: the thing I have said, I have meant ... always: and in things I have not said, the silence has had a reason somewhere different perhaps from where you looked for it. And this brings me to complaining that you, who profess to believe in me, do yet obviously believe that it was only merely silence, which I required of you on one occasion--and that if I had 'known your power over yourself,' I should not have minded ... no! In other words you believe of me that I was thinking just of my own (what shall I call it for a motive base and small enough?) my own scrupulousness ... freedom from embarrassment! of myself in the least of me; in the tying of my shoestrings, say!--so much and no more! Now this is so wrong, as to make me impatient sometimes in feeling it to be your impression: I asked for silence--but _also_ and chiefly for the putting away of ... you know very well what I asked for. And this was sincerely done, I attest to you. You wrote once to me ... oh, long before May and the day we met: that you 'had been so happy, you should be now justified to yourself in taking any step most hazardous to the happiness of your life'--but if you were justified, could _I_ be therefore justified in abetting such a step,--the step of wasting, in a sense, your best feelings ... of emptying your water gourds into the sand? What I thought then I think now--just what any third person, knowing you, would think, I think and feel. I thought too, at first, that the feeling on your part was a mere generous impulse, likely to expand itself in a week perhaps. It affects me and has affected me, very deeply, more than I dare attempt to say, that you should persist _so_--and if sometimes I have felt, by a sort of instinct, that after all you would not go on to persist, and that (being a man, you know) you might mistake, a little unconsciously, the strength of your own feeling; you ought not to be surprised; when I felt it was more advantageous and happier for you that it should be so. _In any case_, I shall never regret my own share in the events of this summer, and your friendship will be dear to me to the last. You know I told you so--not long since.