It will prove how hard it is for the tenderest friends to help paining one another, since _you_ have pained _me_.

See what a deep wound I must have in me, to be pained by the touch of such a hand.

Oh, I am morbid, I very well know.

But the truth is that I have been miserably upset by your book, and that if I had had the least imagination of your intending to touch upon certain biographical details in relation to me, I would have conjured you by your love to me and by my love to you, to forbear it altogether.

You cannot understand; no, you cannot understand with all your wide sympathy (perhaps, because you are not morbid, and I am), the sort of susceptibility I have upon one subject.