I have seen her reading other books early in the day but never without a guilty look on her face, for she thought reading was scarce respectable until night had come. She spends the forenoon in what she calls doing nothing, which may consist in stitching so hard that you would swear she was an over-worked seamstress at it for her life, or you will find her on a table with nails in her mouth, and anon she has to be chased from the garret (she has suddenly decided to change her curtains), or she is under the bed searching for band-boxes and asking sternly where we have put that bonnet. On the whole she is behaving in a most exemplary way to-day (not once have we caught her trying to go out into the washing-house), and we compliment her at dinner-time, partly because she deserves it, and partly to make her think herself so good that she will eat something, just to maintain her new character. I question whether one hour of all her life was given to thoughts of food; in her great days to eat seemed to her to be waste of time, and afterwards she only ate to boast of it, as something she had done to please us. She seldom remembered whether she had dined, but always presumed she had, and while she was telling me in all good faith what the meal consisted of, it might be brought in. When in London I had to hear daily what she was eating, and perhaps she had refused all dishes until they produced the pen and ink. These were flourished before her, and then she would say with a sigh, 'Tell him I am to eat an egg.' But they were not so easily deceived; they waited, pen in hand, until the egg was eaten.
She never 'went for a walk' in her life. Many long trudges she had as a girl when she carried her father's dinner in a flagon to the country place where he was at work, but to walk with no end save the good of your health seemed a very droll proceeding to her. In her young days, she was positive, no one had ever gone for a walk, and she never lost the belief that it was an absurdity introduced by a new generation with too much time on their hands. That they enjoyed it she could not believe; it was merely a form of showing off, and as they passed her window she would remark to herself with blasting satire, 'Ay, Jeames, are you off for your walk?' and add fervently, 'Rather you than me!' I was one of those who walked, and though she smiled, and might drop a sarcastic word when she saw me putting on my boots, it was she who had heated them in preparation for my going. The arrangement between us was that she should lie down until my return, and to ensure its being carried out I saw her in bed before I started, but with the bang of the door she would be at the window to watch me go: there is one spot on the road where a thousand times I have turned to wave my stick to her, while she nodded and smiled and kissed her hand to me.
That kissing of the hand was the one English custom she had learned.
In an hour or so I return, and perhaps find her in bed, according to promise, but still I am suspicious. The way to her detection is circuitous.
'I'll need to be rising now,' she says, with a yawn that may be genuine.
'How long have you been in bed?'
'You saw me go.'
'And then I saw you at the window. Did you go straight back to bed?'
'Surely I had that much sense.'
'The truth!'
'I might have taken a look at the clock first.'
'It is a terrible thing to have a mother who prevaricates. Have you been lying down ever since I left?'
'Thereabout.'
'What does that mean exactly?'
'Off and on.'
'Have you been to the garret?'
'What should I do in the garret?'
'But have you?'
'I might just have looked up the garret stair.'
'You have been redding up the garret again!'
'Not what you could call a redd up.'
'O, woman, woman, I believe you have not been in bed at all!'
'You see me in it.'
'My opinion is that you jumped into bed when you heard me open the door.'
'Havers.'
'Did you?'
'No.'
'Well, then, when you heard me at the gate?'
'It might have been when I heard you at the gate.'
As daylight goes she follows it with her sewing to the window, and gets another needleful out of it, as one may run after a departed visitor for a last word, but now the gas is lit, and no longer is it shameful to sit down to literature. If the book be a story by George Eliot or Mrs. Oliphant, her favourites (and mine) among women novelists, or if it be a Carlyle, and we move softly, she will read, entranced, for hours. Her delight in Carlyle was so well known that various good people would send her books that contained a page about him; she could place her finger on any passage wanted in the biography as promptly as though she were looking for some article in her own drawer, and given a date she was often able to tell you what they were doing in Cheyne Row that day. Carlyle, she decided, was not so much an ill man to live with as one who needed a deal of managing, but when I asked if she thought she could have managed him she only replied with a modest smile that meant 'Oh no!' but had the face of 'Sal, I would have liked to try.'
