assive 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 I
am 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 evidently "swear
"--"G. bless and keep my boy from evil." And again, with the thin
handwriting shaken by distress: "D. would not go to church, and hardened
his heart and said wicked infidel things, much disrespect of the clergy.
The anthem is tiresome!!! That men should set up to be wiser than
their maker!!!" Then trebly underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING."
Dreadful little tangle of misapprehensions and false judgments! More
comforting for me to read, "D. very kind and good. He grows more
thoughtful every day." I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.

At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think the
death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for many
years to think for herself. Even she could not go on living in any peace
at all, believing th