ssible to give her any pleasure, and
she had no sort of intention of pleasing anyone else. It was so
difficult to see what kind of effect this dismal purgatory was meant to
have on any human soul. She was not improved by suffering--she grew
daily more callous and spiteful before one's eyes. One of her few
pleasures was to sit in the garden pretending to be asleep, when all
the family were out, and tell tales of the gardener for neglecting his
work, and of the maid-servants for picking the strawberries. Yet she
had been a shrewd and kindly woman once, and had brought up her
children well. If she had died a dozen years before she would have been
truly and tearfully mourned, and now when everyone tacitly felt that
she had outstayed her welcome, she lingered on. She had a bad illness
at one time, and when I saw her, for the first time after her recovery,
in the family circle, and said something commonplace about being glad
to see her so well, "Yes," she said, looking round with an air of
malicious triumph, "they can't get rid of me just yet--I know that is
what they all feel, but they have to pretend to be glad I am better."

And then, too, there is another type of age which is hardly less
painful, and that is the complacent and sententious old person,
intolerably talkative and minutely confidential, who lays down the law
about everything, and takes what he calls the privileges of age, a sort
of professional patriarch, ruddy and snowy-haired and wide-awake, a
terrible specimen of a well-made machine, which goes on working long
after heart and brain alike are atrophied. I have known an old man of
this kind. He insisted on everything being done for his convenience. He
breakfasted very late, and would allow no one to have any food earlier,
saying that it did young people good to wait; that he had always done
work before breakfast, and that there was nothing like an empty stomach
for keeping the head clear. He would not allow the morning paper to be
opened till he came down; and he sate an intolerable time after
breakfast reading extracts from it, often stopping in the middle of a
sentence because some other paragraph had caught his eye. He had a
horrible way of saying, "Guess what has happened to one of our friends;
I will give you ten guesses each"; and he would insist on all kinds of
conjectures being hazarded, while he chuckled over the absurdities
suggested. He took a frank pleasure in the death of his contemporaries,
and