THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

little girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted. And I think, too, she

must have seenherself ruling a seemly "home of taste," with a

vivarium in the conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or

again, making preserves in the kitchen. My father's science-

teaching, his diagrams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of

prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, his disposition

towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a

clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes,

must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent

anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he would

swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed

like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She

was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to

understand or tolerate these outbreaks. She tried them by her

standards, and by her standards they were wrong. Her standards hid

him from her. The blazing things he said rankled in her mind

unforgettably.

As I remember them together they chafed constantly. Her attitude to

nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical

disapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to me and

not to her. "YOUR father," she used to call him, as though I had

got him for her.

She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally self-

subsisting before her marriage. Even in those Herne Hill days I

used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old

speculative curiosity return as I write this. She took a

considerable interest in the housework that our generally

servantless condition put upon her-she used to have a charwoman in

two or three times a week-but she did not do it with any great

skill. She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting

covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment. The

Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was

crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with

the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the

veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal dread of "blacks"

by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were

rarely open.

She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the

headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I

think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in

railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the

Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do

not think she opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that

dated from her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in

them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I

remember with particular animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE

WORLD. She made these books of hers into a class apart by sewing

outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin. To me in these

habiliments they seemed not so much books as confederated old

ladies.

My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and

rejoiced to watch me in the choir.

On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the

table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning

stockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather

stuffy comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I

think she found these among her happy times. On such occasions she

was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of

thoughtless musing that would last for long intervals and rouse my

curiosity. For like most young people I could not imagine mental

states without definite forms.

She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and

friends, writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing

mainly with births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the

vaguest terms) and the distresses of bankruptcy.

And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own

that I suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes

credible to me. She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a

diary of fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket

books. She put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer

stiff little comments on casual visitors,-" Miss G. and much noisy

shrieking talk about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY. A.

delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE." Such little human entries abound.

She had an odd way of never writing a name, only an initial; my

father is always "A.," and Iam always "D." It is manifest she

followed the domestic events in the life of the Princess of Wales,

who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy. "Pray

G. all may be well," she writes in one such crisis.

But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to

tell easily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in

very great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments. Then

later I find such things as this: "Heard D. s--." The "s" is