llections and experiences that make
up one's being, fluctuates, perishes, dissolves... But no! It could
not, should not be so! There should be no changes and no losses! Nothing
should ever move--neither the past nor the present--and she herself
least of all! And so the tenacious woman, hoarding her valuables,
decreed their immortality with all the resolution of her soul. She would
not lose one memory or one pin.

She gave orders that nothing should be thrown away--and nothing was.
There, in drawer after drawer, in wardrobe after wardrobe, reposed the
dresses of seventy years. But not only the dresses--the furs and the
mantles and subsidiary frills and the muffs and the parasols and the
bonnets--all were ranged in chronological order, dated and complete. A
great cupboard was devoted to the dolls; in the china room at Windsor a
special table held the mugs of her childhood, and her children's mugs as
well. Mementoes of the past surrounded her in serried accumulations.
In every room the tables were powdered thick with the photographs of
relatives; their portraits, revealing them at all ages, covered the
walls; their figures, in solid marble, rose up from pedestals, or
gleamed from brackets in the form of gold and silver statuettes. The
dead, in every shape--in miniatures, in porcelain, in enormous life-size
oil-paintings--were perpetually about her. John Brown stood upon her
writing-table in solid gold. Her favourite horses and dogs, endowed with
a new durability, crowded round her footsteps. Sharp, in silver gilt,
dominated the dinner table; Boy and Boz lay together among unfading
flowers, in bronze. And it was not enough that each particle of the
past should be given the stability of metal or of marble: the whole
collection, in its arrangement, no less than its entity, should be
immutably fixed. There might be additions, but there might never be
alterations. No chintz might change, no carpet, no curtain, be replaced
by another; or, if long use at last made it necessary, the stuffs and
the patterns must be so identically reproduced that the keenest eye
might not detect the difference. No new picture could be hung upon the
walls at Windsor, for those already there had been put in their places
by Albert, whose decisions were eternal. So, indeed, were Victoria's.
To ensure that they should be the aid of the camera was called in. Every
single article in the Queen's possession was photographed from several
points of view. These