2. Larkin described JWC on this visit as “very kind, but reserved, and I thought looked strangely sorrowful, as if some great
trouble were weighing her down; I thought she looked ill, and yet there was evidently something more depressing than mere
bodily suffering.” After TC had entered and tea was served, Larkin described “the strange feeling of reserve which seemed
to have taken possession of all three of us. … At length Carlyle abruptly introduced the business which had brought me there.
… Perhaps my face brightened at this, but certainly his own reserve there and then fell from him, and for the first time I
felt that I saw Carlyle himself. / He told me the Lives of Sterling and Schiller were the first things requiring attention;
and that his wish was to have a summary of each chapter, and an index of both Lives, to be placed at the end of the book.
… He handed me the books … and … walked with me a mile or more on my road, talking in a kind, fatherly way, which sent me
home gratefully triumphant. Mrs. Carlyle was again very kind at parting; but I saw, with a feeling of perplexed disappointment,
the same weary look, almost of indifference, which I had noticed when I entered. I little knew then the wearing misery of
her life, and little thought how anxiously she was foreboding that all this ‘romantic devotion,’ as she afterwards called
it, on my part, and Carlyle's ready acceptance of it, must inevitably end in trouble to us both. This was the time which Carlyle,
in his Reminiscences, so sadly speaks of, as ‘the nadir of her sufferings’” (Larkin, BQR 33–34).
