But merely to smile and smile is not to partake; so I ventured to suggest that to judge from my last letter from my godmother she, at any rate, was in her usual health; and I added, rather more cheerfully perhaps than the fact warranted, that my family seemed to be doomed too, since, so far as I was aware, I myself was the last of it left alive.
At this a sudden gush of shame welled up in me at the thought that through all my troubles I had never once remembered the kindnesses of my step-grandfather; that he, too, might be dead. I was so rapt away by the thought that I caught only the last three words of Miss Bullace’s murmured aside to Lady Pollacke, viz., “not blush unseen.”
Lady Pollacke raised her eyebrows and nodded vigorously; and then to my joy Mr. Crimble and a venerable old lady with silver curls clustering out of her bonnet were shown into the room. He looked pale and absent as he bent himself down to take my hand. It was almost as if in secret collusion we had breathed the word Fanny together. Mrs. Crimble was supplied with a teacup, and her front teeth were soon unusually busy with a slice of thin bread and butter. Eating or drinking, her intense old eyes dwelt distantly but assiduously on my small shape; and she at last entered into a long story of how, as a girl, she had been taken to a circus—a circus: and there had seen. … But what she had seen Mr. Crimble refused to let her divulge. He jerked forward so hastily that his fragment of toasted scone rolled off his plate into the wild beast’s skin, and while, with some little difficulty, he was retrieving it, he assured us that his mother’s memory was little short of miraculous, and particularly in relation to the past.
“I have noticed,” he remarked, in what I thought a rather hollow voice, “that the more advanced in years we—er—happily become, the more closely we return to childhood.”
“Senile. …” I began timidly, remembering Dr. Phelps’s phrase.
But Mr. Crimble hastened on. “Why, mother,” he appealed to her, with an indulgent laugh, “I suppose to you I am still nothing but a small boy about that height?” He stretched out a ringless left hand about twenty-four inches above the rose-patterned carpet.
The old lady was not to be so easily smoothed over. “You interrupted me, Harold,” she retorted, with some little show of indignation, “in what I was telling Lady Pollacke. Even a child of that size would have been a perfect monstrosity.”
A lightning grimace swept over Miss Bullace’s square features.
“Ah, ah, ah!” laughed Mr. Crimble, “I am rebuked, I am in the corner! Another scone, Lady Pollacke?” Mrs. Crimble was a beautiful old lady; but it was with a rather unfriendly and feline eye that she continued to regard me; and I wondered earnestly if Fanny had ever noticed this characteristic.
“The fact of the matter is,” said Lady Pollacke, with conviction, “our memories rust for want of exercise. Where, physically speaking, would you be, Mr. Crimble, if you hadn’t the parish to tramp over? Precisely the same with the mind. Every day I make a personal effort to commit some salient fact to memory—such a fact, for a trivial example, as the date of the Norman Conquest. The consequence is, my husband tells me, I am a veritable encyclopaedia. My father took after me. Alexander the Great, I have read somewhere, could address by name—though one may assume not Christian name—every soldier in his army. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a great genius, poor man, knew by heart every book he had ever read. A veritable mine of memory. On the other hand, I once had a parlourmaid, Sarah Jakes, who couldn’t remember even the simplest of her duties, and if it hadn’t been for my constant supervision would have given us port with the soup.”
“Perfectly, perfectly true,” assented Miss Bullace. “Now mine is a verbal memory. My mind is a positive magnet for words. Method, of course, is everything. I weld. Let us say that a line of a poem terminates with the word bower, and the next line commences with she, I commit these to memory as one word—Bowershee—and so master the sequence. My old friend, Lady Bovill Porter—we were schoolfellows—recommended this method. It was Edmund Kean’s, I fancy, or some other well-known actor’s. How else indeed, could a great actor realize what he was doing? Word-perfect, you see, he is free.”
“Exactly, exactly,” sagely nodded Mr. Crimble, but with a countenance so colourless and sad that it called back to my remembrance the picture of a martyr—of St. Sebastian, I think—that used to hang up in my mother’s room.
“And you?”—I discovered Lady Pollacke was rather shrilly inquiring of me. “Is yours a verbal memory like Miss Bullace’s; or are you in my camp?”
“Ah, there,” cried Mr. Crimble, tilting back his chair in sudden enthusiasm. “Miss M. positively puts me to shame. And poetry, Miss Bullace; even your wonderful repertory!”
“You mean Miss M. recites?” inquired Miss Bullace, leaning forward over her lap. “But how entrancing! It is we, then, who are birds of a feather. And how I should adore to hear a fellow-enthusiast. Now, won’t you, Lady Pollacke, join your
