nough the superstition that Granny is
a very solid and strenuous and rather grim person, with a capacity for
facing the world, that we, a relaxed generation, have weakly lost.
She knows as much about the world as a tin jelly-mould knows about the
dinner, and is the oddest mixture of brooding anxieties over things that
don't in the least matter and of bland failure to suspect things that
intensely do. She lives in short in a weird little waste of words--over
the moral earnestness we none of us cultivate; yet hasn't a notion
of any effective earnestness herself except on the subject of empty
bottles, which have, it would appear, noble neglected uses. At this time
of day it doesn't matter, but if there could have been dropped into her
empty bottles, at an earlier stage, something to strengthen a little any
wine of life they were likely to contain, she wouldn't have figured so
as the head and front of all our sentimentality.

I judge it, for that matter, a proof of our flat "modernity" in this
order that the scant starch holding her together is felt to give her
among us this antique and austere consistency. I don't talk things
over with Lorraine for nothing, and she does keep for me the flashes of
perception we neither of us waste on the others. It's the "antiquity
of the age of crinoline," she said the other day a propos of a little
carte-de-visite photograph of my ancestress as a young woman of the time
of the War; looking as if she had been violently inflated from below,
but had succeeded in resisting at any cost, and with a strange intensity
of expression, from her waist up. Mother, however, I must say, is as
wonderful about her as about everything else, and arranges herself,
exactly, to appear a mere contemporary illustration (being all the while
three times the true picture) in order that her parent shall have the
importance of the Family Portrait. I don't mean of course that she has
told me so; but she cannot see that if she hasn't that importance Granny
has none other; and it's therefore as if she pretended she had a ruff,
a stomacher, a farthingale and all the rest--grand old angles and
eccentricities and fine absurdities: the hard white face, if necessary,
of one who has seen witches burned.

She hasn't any more than any one else among us a gleam of fine
absurdity: that's a product that seems unable, for the life of it, and
though so indispensable (say) for literary material, to grow here; but,
exquisitely determ