_February 14th._ Well, dearest Walter, it laid me after all so flat that I broke down, a week ago, in the foregoing attempt to do you, and your ineffable procédé, some manner of faint justice; I wasn't then apt for any sort of right or worthy approach to you, and there was nothing for me but resignedly to intermit and _me recoucher_. You had done it with your own mailed fist--mailed in glittering gold, speciously glazed in polished, inconceivably and indescribably sublimated, leather, and I had rallied but too superficially from the stroke. It claimed its victim afresh, and I have lain the better part of a week just languidly heaving and groaning as a result _de vos oeuvres_--and forced thereby quite to neglect and ignore all letters. I am a little more on my feet again, and if this continues shall presently be able to return to town (Saturday or Monday;) where, however, the monstrous object will again confront me. That is the grand fact of the situation--that is the tawny lion, portentous creature, in my path. I can't get past him, I can't get round him, and on the other hand he stands glaring at me, refusing to give way and practically blocking all my future. I can't live with him, you see; because I can't live _up_ to him. His claims, his pretensions, his dimensions, his assumptions and consumptions, above all the manner in which he causes every surrounding object (on my poor premises or within my poor range) to tell a dingy or deplorable tale--all this makes him the very scourge of my life, the very blot on my scutcheon. He doesn't regild that rusty metal--he simply takes up an attitude of gorgeous swagger, straight in front of all the rust and the rubbish, which makes me look as if I had stolen _somebody else's_ (re-garnished _blason_) and were trying to palm it off as my own. Cher et bon Gaultier, I simply can't _afford_ him, and that is the sorry homely truth. _He is out of the picture_--out of _mine_; and behold me condemned to live forever with that canvas turned to the wall. Do you know what that means?--to have to give up going about at all, lest complications (of the most incalculable order) should ensue from its being seen what I go about _with_. Bonne renommée vaut mieux que sac-de-voyage doré, and though I may have had weaknesses that have brought me a little under public notice, my modest hold-all (which has accompanied me in most of my voyage through life) has at least, so far as I know, never _fait jaser_. All this I have to think of--and I put it candidly to you while yet there is time. That you shouldn't have counted the cost--to yourself--that is after all perhaps conceivable (quoiqu'à peine!) but that you shouldn't have counted the cost to _me_, to whom it spells ruin: _that_ ranks you with those great lurid, though lovely, romantic and historic figures and charmers who have scattered their affections and lavished their favours only (as it has presently appeared) to consume and to destroy! More prosaically, dearest Walter (if one of the most lyric acts recorded in history--and one of the most finely aesthetic, and one stamped with the most matchless grace, _has_ a prosaic side,) I have been truly overwhelmed by the princely munificence and generosity of your procédé, and I have gasped under it while tossing on the bed of indisposition. For a beau geste, c'est le plus beau, by all odds, of any in all my life ever esquissé in my direction, and it _has_, as such, left me really and truly panting helplessly after--or rather quite intensely _before_--it! What is a poor man to do, mon prince, mon bon prince, mon grand prince, when so prodigiously practised upon? There is _nothing_, you see: for the proceeding itself swallows at a gulp, with its open crimson jaws (_such_ a rosy mouth!) like Carlyle's Mirabeau, "all formulas." One doesn't "thank," I take it, when the heavens open--that is when the whale of Mr. Allen's-in-the-Strand celestial shopfront does--and discharge straight into one's lap the perfect compendium, the very burden of the song, of just what the Angels have been raving about ever since we first heard of them. Well _may_ they have raved--but I can't, you see; I have to take the case (the incomparable suit-case) in abject silence and submission. Ah, Walter, Walter, why do you do these things? they're magnificent, but they're not--well, discussable or permissible or forgiveable. At least not all at once. It will take a long, long time. Only little by little and buckle-hole by buckle-hole, shall I be able to look, with you, even one strap in the face. As yet a sacred horror possesses me, and I must ask you to let me, please, though writing you at such length, not so much as mention the subject. It's better so.