THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE
But she was foolish to complain. Probably she owed her intimacy to that very fact—she was only three feet two. Swift had lived, a lifetime among the giants; now there was a charm in dwarfs. He took the little creature into his library. “ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I have brought you here to show you all the Money I got when I was in the Ministry, but don’t steal any of it.’ ‘I won’t, indeed, Sir,’ said I; so he opened a Cabinet, and showed me a whole parcel of empty drawers. ‘Bless me,’ says he, ‘the Money is flown.’ ” There was a charm in her surprise; there was a charm in her humility, He could beat her and bully her, make her shout when he was deaf, force her husband to drink the lees of the wine, pay their cab fares, stuff guineas into a piece of gingerbread, and relent surprisingly, as if there were something grimly pleasing to him in the thought of so foolish a midget setting up to have a life and a mind of her own. For with Swift she was herself; it was the effect of his genius. She had to pull off her stockings if he told her to. So, though his satire terrified her, and she found it highly unpleasant to dine at the Deanery and see him watching, in the great glass which hung before him for that purpose, the butler stealing beer at the sideboard, she knew that it was a privilege to walk with him in his garden; to hear him talk of Mr. Pope and quote Hudibras; and then be hustled back in the rain to save coach hire, and then to sit chatting in the parlour with Mrs. Brent, the housekeeper, about the Dean’s oddity and charity, and
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