Yours, dearest Harry, more affectionately than ever,
/# Mrs. Brookenham is of course the mother of the young heroine of _The Awkward Age_. #/
I very earnestly beg you not to take as the measure of the pleasure given me by your letter the inordinate delay of this acknowledgment. That admirable communication, reaching me at the climax of the London June, found me in a great tangle of difficulties over the command of my time and general conduct of my correspondence and other obligations; so that after a vain invocation of a better promptness where you were concerned, I took heart from the fact that I was soon to be at peace down here, and that hence I should be able to address you at my ease. I have in fact been here but a few days, and my slight further delay has but risen from the fact that I brought down with me so _many_ letters to answer!--though none of them, let me say, begins to affect me with the beauty and interest of yours.
I am in truth greatly touched, deeply moved by it. What is one to say or do in presence of an expression so generous and so penetrating? I can only listen very hard, as it were, taking it all in with bowed head and clasped hands, not to say moist eyes even, and feel that--well, that the whole thing _has_ been after all worth while then. But one is simply in the _hands_ of such a reader and appreciator as you--one yields even assentingly, gratefully and irresponsibly to the current of your story and consistency of your case. I feel that I really don't know much--as to what your various particulars imply--save that you are delightful, are dazzling, and that you must be beautifully right as to any view that you take of anything. Let me say, for all, that if you think so, so it must be; for clearly you see and understand and discriminate--while one is at the end of time one's self so very vague about many things and only conscious of one's general virtuous intentions and considerably strenuous effort. What one has done has been conditioned and related and involved--so to say, fatalised--every element and effort jammed up against some other necessity or yawning over some consequent void--and with anything good in one's achievement or fine in one's faculty conscious all the while of having to _pay_ by this and that and the other corresponding dereliction or weakness. You let me off, however, as handsomely as you draw me on, and I see you as absolutely right about everything and want only to square with yours _my_ impression: that is to say any but that of my being "dim" in respect to some of the aspects, possibly, of Mrs. Brookenham--which I don't think I am: I really think I could stand a stiff cross-examination on that lady. But this is a detail, and I can meet you only in a large and fond pre-submission on the various points you make. I greatly wish our contact at Oxford the other day had been less hampered and reduced--so that it was impossible, in the event, altogether, to get within hail of you at Oriel. But I have promised the kind President of Magdalen another visit, and then I shall insist on being free to come and see you if you will let me. I cherish your letter and our brief talk meanwhile as charmingly-coloured lights in the total of that shining occasion. What power to irradiate has Oxford at its best!--and as it was, the other week, so greatly at that best. I _think_ the gruesome little errors of text you once so devotedly noted for me in some of my original volumes don't for the most part survive in the collective edition--but though a strenuous I am a constitutionally fallible proof-reader, and I am almost afraid to assure myself. However, I must more or less face it, and I am yours, dear Mr. Chapman, all gratefully and faithfully,