nts, gravely reading
the "Wesleyan Methodist Recorder," the shop at Babington, her father's
discontent, his solitary fishing and reading, his discovery of music...
science... classical music in the first Novello editions... Faraday...
speaking to Faraday after lectures. Marriage... the new house... the
red brick wall at the end of the garden where young peach-trees were
planted... running up and downstairs and singing.. . both of them
singing in the rooms and the garden... she sometimes with her hair down
and then when visitors were expected pinned in coils under a little cap
and wearing a small hoop... the garden and lawns and shrubbery and the
long kitchen-garden and the summer-house under the oaks beyond and the
pretty old gabled "town" on the river and the woods all along the river
valley and the hills shining up out of the mist. The snow man they both
made in the winter--the birth of Sarah and then Eve... his studies and
book-buying--and after five years her own disappointing birth as the
third girl, and the coming of Harriett just over a year later...
her mother's illness, money troubles--their two years at the sea to
retrieve... the disappearance of the sunlit red-walled garden always
in full summer sunshine with the sound of bees in it or dark from
windows... the narrowing of the house-life down to the Marine
Villa--with the sea creeping in--wading out through the green shallows,
out and out till you were more than waist deep--shrimping and prawning
hour after hour for weeks together... poking in the rock pools, watching
the sun and the colours in the strange afternoons... then the sudden
large house at Barnes with the "drive" winding to the door.... He used
to come home from the City and the Constitutional Club and sometimes
instead of reading "The Times" or the "Globe" or the "Proceedings of the
British Association" or Herbert Spencer, play Pope Joan or Jacoby with
them all, or Table Billiards and laugh and be "silly" and take his
turn at being "bumped" by Timmy going the round of the long dining-room
table, tail in the air; he had taken Sarah and Eve to see "Don Giovanni"
and "Winter's Tale" and the new piece, "Lohengrin." No one at the
tennis-club had seen that. He had good taste. No one else had been to
Madame Schumann's Farewell... sitting at the piano with her curtains of
hair and her dreamy smile... and the Philharmonic Concerts. No one else
knew about the lectures at the Royal Institution, beginning at ni