to form in
spite of the difference of their years a close alliance with my mother.
She was the heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women, the least
apologetic, the least morbid in her misfortune. She carried it high
aloft with loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the breeze
as if it had been the flag of her country. It consisted mainly of a big
red face, indescribably out of drawing, from which she glared at you
through gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic circles of such diameter and so
frequently displaced that some one had vividly spoken of her as
flattering her nose against the glass of her spectacles. She was
extraordinarily near-sighted, and whatever they did to other objects they
magnified immensely the kind eyes behind them. Blest conveniences they
were, in their hideous, honest strength--they showed the good lady
everything in the world but her own queerness. This element was enhanced
by wild braveries of dress, reckless charges of colour and stubborn
resistances of cut, wondrous encounters in which the art of the toilet
seemed to lay down its life. She had the tread of a grenadier and the
voice of an angel.

In the course of a walk with her the day after my arrival I found myself
grabbing her arm with sudden and undue familiarity. I had been struck by
the beauty of a face that approached us and I was still more affected
when I saw the face, at the sight of my companion, open like a window
thrown wide. A smile fluttered out of it an brightly as a drapery
dropped from a sill--a drapery shaken there in the sun by a young lady
flanked by two young men, a wonderful young lady who, as we drew nearer,
rushed up to Mrs. Meldrum with arms flourished for an embrace. My
immediate impression of her had been that she was dressed in mourning,
but during the few moments she stood talking with our friend I made more
discoveries. The figure from the neck down was meagre, the stature
insignificant, but the desire to please towered high, as well as the air
of infallibly knowing how and of never, never missing it. This was a
little person whom I would have made a high bid for a good chance to
paint. The head, the features, the colour, the whole facial oval and
radiance had a wonderful purity; the deep grey eyes--the most agreeable,
I thought, that I had ever seen--brushed with a kind of winglike grace
every object they encountered. Their possessor was just back from
Boulogne, where she had spent a week w