Autograph letter signed : London, to Dr. Baldwin, 1894 Feb. 2.

Concerning the death of Miss Woolson; thanking him for his two letters and saying "...they are the only written words, or rays of faint knowledge, that I have received during these horror-haunted days...I grieve more than I can say to hear you have been ill in the shock of all this tragedy - and you have my closest sympathy. Have courage and have patience - they see everything through. Meanwhile, for myself, though completely without information (from Venice) I can't help seeing and reading that unspeakable event in the light of some of my general impressions and anxieties. I don't know how much of your own (after all tolerably close) knowledge and observation will confirm what I say - but I had two or three years ago very gloomily and dolorously made up my mind that she was not positively and wholly sane. My reasons are too many and too private to give you here; but when I see you we will talk about them. To my own vision the horror of last week throws an ineffably sad but very distinct light far away back on symptoms and idiosyncrasies. She was exquisitely morbid and tragically sensitive; in other words she was the victim of chronic melancholia and of the tendency to suffer and to insist on suffering, more than [any] human being I have met. A beneficent providence seemed to have constructed her - pitilessly - for the express purpose of suffering, with an ingenuity worthy of a better cause. Half of my friendship for her was a deep solicitude, a deep compassion, a vigilant precaution, so far as was possible, about all this. The world didn't see it - she didn't show it - socially - but I think you will agree with me that it was impossible to know her well without being conscious of it. I at any rate knew her well enough to be painfully so - though the event has far surpassed my worst apprehensions of tragedy. If it had not been, however, for certain scattered and definite symptoms to the contrary (suggestions of a bad, a very morbid phase), I should have thought that the general tendency of her circumstances was to make for an easier, a brighter prospect. - Basta. I can't write more about the dark business - we must keep it till we meet; and the haunting obsession of the fact, the act, is a thing to try with all one's might to get rid of ... She kept us both ignorant - with a perversity that was diseased. But infinite pity is the only word one can have for her and the joy that, horrible as was the gate through which she passed, she is eternally and inaccessibly at rest."