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 p