[New York City—Wednesday, 22 April 1868]
Wednesday April 22d Rose at six this morning sleep being out of the question. I must confess to sitting down in my night-dress in a flood of tears. When I remember all Dickens has been, has become to us in these short short months and that I can never see him again under the same conditions, even if we should ever meet at all in this world it seems more than I can bear. Jamie feels this too but he will go to the steamer and will always have perhaps a more repose-full connection than is possible on earth between men and women. In the numbers of people who have lavished every thing upon Charles Dickens, the beautiful, the inspired, what to him can be the tenderness of one woman like myself—I say this and then I remember how precious beyond all gifts is the gift of love and I feel instinctively that what is everything to him must in Heaven’s goodness be something to him. Mary Dickens’s letter has not reached me unhappily.
