again Mrs. Hilbery was of
two minds, and a thick packet of manuscript was shelved for further
consideration.

Several years were now altogether omitted, because Mrs. Hilbery had
found something distasteful to her in that period, and had preferred to
dwell upon her own recollections as a child. After this, it seemed
to Katharine that the book became a wild dance of will-o'-the-wisps,
without form or continuity, without coherence even, or any attempt to
make a narrative. Here were twenty pages upon her grandfather's taste in
hats, an essay upon contemporary china, a long account of a summer day's
expedition into the country, when they had missed their train, together
with fragmentary visions of all sorts of famous men and women, which
seemed to be partly imaginary and partly authentic. There were,
moreover, thousands of letters, and a mass of faithful recollections
contributed by old friends, which had grown yellow now in their
envelopes, but must be placed somewhere, or their feelings would be
hurt. So many volumes had been written about the poet since his death
that she had also to dispose of a great number of misstatements, which
involved minute researches and much correspondence. Sometimes Katharine
brooded, half crushed, among her papers; sometimes she felt that it was
necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the
past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present,
which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to
be of an utterly thin and inferior composition.

The worst of it was that she had no aptitude for literature. She did
not like phrases. She had even some natural antipathy to that process of
self-examination, that perpetual effort to understand one's own feeling,
and express it beautifully, fitly, or energetically in language, which
constituted so great a part of her mother's existence. She was, on the
contrary, inclined to be silent; she shrank from expressing herself even
in talk, let alone in writing. As this disposition was highly convenient
in a family much given to the manufacture of phrases, and seemed to
argue a corresponding capacity for action, she was, from her childhood
even, put in charge of household affairs. She had the reputation, which
nothing in her manner contradicted, of being the most practical of
people. Ordering meals, directing servants, paying bills, and so
contriving that every clock ticked more or less accurately in