yet I often deliberately provoked them, because they convinced me that my mother was a human being after all. How imperious and impetuous she was! John is her own son. But she was less generous in imparting her brains to her first-born: he never had half her mental resources. She used to read many abstruse and improving books in the old days; and she could talk politics, or philosophy, or religion, with anybody,—though I doubt whether she was ever more religious than the proprieties of her position required. Of late years she has eschewed the higher walks of literature, and has abandoned herself to novels; and even in her choice of these she has gradually subsided from the classic lucubrations of Walter Scott to such humble wayside flowers as are to be culled from the Seaside Libraries, varied occasionally with an odd volume from the Parisian publications of Calmann, Lévy & Cie. For my part, so far from blaming her, I applaud her good sense. An amusing novel is like the best kind of gossip; gossip is proper to those whose days of youth and activity are over; and, as we see scarcely any company, no other gossip than that of novels is accessible to the dowager Lady Mainwaring.
Well, then, when mother approached me with the manner which I have described, I knew at once that we were about to discuss domestic matters; nor was I much at a loss to divine what the particular matter would probably be. John and Sinfire had gone out for a ride: we were about to converse concerning Sinfire and John. Mother seated herself in the large Japanese arm-chair,—the one made of split cane or bamboo. She just fills it comfortably. She is very much broader than she used to be, and her once delicate complexion has acquired a substantial and permanent ruddiness. It sometimes seems as if mother had not so much enlarged, as actually become possessed of a different body from that in which she spent her youth. If it were not unbecoming to speculate about the skeleton of one's parent, I should be inclined to think that her present osseous framework had been designed for a British fishwife. Except for this physical expansion, however, she remains at least as aristocratic as ever. Rembrandt, or perhaps Rubens, would have made a splendid portrait of her. Her eyebrows are set high in her forehead: the spaces immediately above and below the eye are full, showing a fluent command of words; her nose is a moderate but unmistakable aquiline; her upper lip is thinner than the lower, which is moulded on a resolute chin. Her gray hair is covered with a black lace cap, the wide strings of which fall down on either side her cheeks. Her summer costume is ordinarily of some substance which I will venture to call black grenadine, with lace embellishments, and some glimpses of white ruching at the throat and wrists. It makes no attempt to mould itself
