“26th. Friday. I am afraid I don’t care near so much for—as I did,—am I changeable or is she changed? or is my standard altered?... I read once of a person whose physical condition was such that he _could_ not love one person intensely for long,—not many years if thrown much together.... I sometimes fear I am similarly constituted. For even those nearest and dearest I have experienced those fluctuations.... It is like a frightful trance to know that I _cannot_ keep a warm deep love equal; and yet in a manner the real undercurrent of love flows on even in these estrangements,—I cannot in _myself_ cease to love one who has ever been the object of that wild adoring love, though in my outer mind and heart this tormenting, fiendlike malady makes me hate and shrink from them while its fearful influence reigns. God grant there is no touch of insanity in it; no words can tell how I dread and deprecate it. There is a loathsome horrible fear in my mind of its coming ever and anon. My ..., my beautiful, whom I used to think mysteriously close to my soul, it has come on her. Oh, God pity me! I fear I shall go wild. Every action, every word of her’s seems to anger me unreasonably,—I feel the fiend on me and yet the wild resistless love will not quite be swept away, and comes back in floods of passing tenderness for a moment. And I can’t tell her, make her understand, and she will lose her love for me and—oh, dear I am very miserable. God grant in pity it may never fall on my Mother! I have a horrible dread of it. I could not live without her love,—my love for her. And I feel such wild maddening love now, as if I knew it would soon be out of my power to love her.” This, of course, is morbid, and yet here again one is forced to say that her depression is neither feigned nor wholly without reason. Many people have experienced in some degree the elemental fitfulness which she describes, and she probably understood it better than most. And yet how many can testify to her fundamental and self-sacrificing constancy! But there is no doubt that at this period she was living far too self- absorbed a life,—dreaming too much, thinking too much of herself. It was time for something to happen, and fortunately something did happen. Two breezy wholesome girl cousins—half Irish, half Norfolk—came to Sussex Square on a visit. They were the daughters of Ferrier Jex-Blake, S. J.- B.’s uncle, but it chanced that she had never met them before. She was out dining with friends when they arrived. “When I did come home, I went to take off my things, then to the drawing-room, kissed them coolly enough, said, ‘How d’ye do, cousins?’ and sat down to _rattle_. Tried hard to shock them with all sorts of nonsense, and then carried them to see my room, and made them some coffee. They, Elinor and Sarah, knew nothing of me, and did not much admire me, I guess, that night.”