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[Illustration: MY FATHER, ÆT. 50
_Frontispiece_]
OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS
1867-1896
BY
E. F. BENSON
AUTHOR OF “DODO,” “DAVID BLAIZE,”
“MICHAEL,” “QUEEN LUCIA,” ETC.
WITH PORTRAITS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 13
CHAPTER II
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 32
CHAPTER III
LINCOLN AND DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 52
CHAPTER IV
THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 62
CHAPTER V
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 80
CHAPTER VI
THE DUNCE’S PROGRESS 108
CHAPTER VII
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 137
CHAPTER VIII
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 163
CHAPTER IX
THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 189
CHAPTER X
CAMBRIDGE 209
CHAPTER XI
THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 237
CHAPTER XII
AN ARCHÆOLOGICAL EXCURSION 255
CHAPTER XIII
ATHENS AND DODO 276
CHAPTER XIV
ATHENS AND EGYPT 303
INDEX 325
PORTRAITS
MY FATHER, _aet._ 50 _Frontispiece_
PAGE
MY MOTHER, _aet._ 20 19
ELIZABETH COOPER: “BETH”, _aet._ 78 69
E. F. BENSON, _aet._ 19 119
“HIS GRACE” 169
“HER GRACE” 219
E. F. BENSON, _aet._ 22 269
E. F. BENSON, _aet._ 26 287
OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS
CHAPTER I
WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING
My father was headmaster of Wellington College, where and when I was
born, but of him there, in spite of his extraordinarily forcible
personality, I have no clear memory, though the first precise and
definite recollection that I retain at all, heaving out of nothingness,
was connected with him, for it certainly was he, who, standing by the
table in the window of the dining-room with an open newspaper in his
hand, told me never to forget this day on which the Franco-German war
came to an end. Otherwise as regards him, somebody swept by in an
academic cap and gown, a figure not at all awe-inspiring as he became to
me very soon after, but simply a rather distinguished natural phenomenon
to be regarded in the same light as rain or wall-paper or sunshine.
Cudgel my memory as I may, I can evoke no other figure of him at
Wellington, except as something shining and swift; an external object
whirling along on an orbit as inconjecturable as those of the stars, and
wholly uninteresting. He had a study on the left of the front door into
the Master’s Lodge, where there was a big desk with a shiny circular
cover. I know that I was taken in there to say good night to him, but
the most remarkable thing there was the big desk with large handles,
and perhaps a boy standing by it, mountainous in height and looking
extremely polite and gentle. There was the same ceremony every evening:
my father kissed me, put his hand on my head and said, “God bless you
and make you a good boy always.” The most significant detail of that
ritual was that my father’s face was rough, not smooth like the face of
my mother and of Beth, and that there lingered round him or the room a
smell of books and a smell of soap.
A little later on than that there came a period when for half an hour
before bedtime my two sisters and I (for the present the youngest) used
to visit him in that same study while he drew entrancing pictures for
us, each in turn. One of these I found only the other day: it represents
a hill crowned with a castle and a church, in front of which is a small
knight waving his sword in the direction of a terrifying dragon, horned
and tailed, who is flying across the sky. Below in minute capitals runs
a rhyming legend. Or I went to the College chapel, though not often, and
by way of a treat, and there was the same figure in a surplice, in a
stall on the right hand of the door of entrance. I believe I was there
on the last Sunday of his Headmastership and that they sang a hymn which
he wrote.
Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with memories of my
first five years, but externally I have impressions that possess a
haunting vividness comparable only to the texture of dreams, when dreams
are tumultuously alive. All these (and I think the experience is
universal) were external happenings, trivial in themselves, but far more
lasting than emotional affairs in later life. Never shall I forget,
though I have forgotten so much of far vaster import since then, the
discovery of an adder on the croquet lawn outside the nursery windows.
The gardener attacked it with the shears that he had been using for
clipping the edges of the grass: he made fine chopping gestures, and
presently disappeared into the belt of wood with the adder slung on the
blades. There is the vignette: something terribly vivid but girt about
with mist. I have no other knowledge of the gardener but that he killed
an adder with his shears and went into the belt of wood with the corpse
dangling thereon.
There was an evening when, having had my bath in the nursery I escaped
from the hands of my nurse, slippery with soapy water, and looked out of
the nursery window. Then a miracle burst upon my astounded eyes, for,
though it was bedtime my mother was in the act of putting her foot on
her own croquet ball, and with a smart stroke sending the adversary into
the limbo of a flower-bed. That was allowed by the rule of 1870 or
thereabouts, and it gave me the impression of consummate skill and
energy. My mother, you must understand, stood quite still with her own
ball in chancery below her foot. The concussion of her violent mallet
sent the adversary into a flower-bed, and the calceolarias nodded....
Then Beth, my nurse, caught me, and rubbed me dry, and I went to bed
with the delicious sense of my mother’s magnificence, and the marvel of
people still playing croquet in daylight when I had to go to bed. I
think that this occasion was the first on which I recognised my mother
as having a personality of her own. The next confused me again, for on
some birthday of one of us, or at Christmas, Beth told me that
Abracadabra was coming, and that I mustn’t be frightened. I was then
taken to see my mother, who was lying down in her bedroom, and said
that she was very sleepy, and I returned to the nursery. Shortly
afterwards there was a general hubbub in the house, and on being taken
downstairs from the nursery into the hall, I saw a huge bedizened fairy
standing in front of the fireplace. She blew a piercing trumpet at
intervals, and made dance-steps to the right and left. She had a
wonderful hat covered with lilies, and a dress covered with jewels, and
in front of her was a thing that might have been mistaken for the
clothes-basket out of which Beth took clean shirts and socks, but it
could not possibly have been that, because it gleamed with pure gold. A
sheet lay on the top of it, and Abracadabra blew her trumpet, and Beth,
holding me close, said, “Eh, dear, don’t be frightened; it’s all right!”
Obviously it was all right; for to put an end to all tearful tendencies,
Abracadabra, with a magnificent gesture, withdrew the sheet, and hastily
presented me with a clockwork train, just what I had always wanted. She
turned a key in the engine, and the engine then capsized with loud
buzzings, but when Abracadabra put it on its wheels again, it proceeded
to draw three tin carriages after it. And it was mine, the very thing I
had wanted, and Abracadabra smiled as she gave it me, and I thought that
her face was rather like Mamma’s. But the likeness must have been purely
accidental, because Mamma was in her bedroom feeling sleepy. And when
Abracadabra went through the door into the kitchen passage blowing
loudly on her trumpet, and when, after a few excursions of the clockwork
train, I was allowed to go up to her room again, and found her still
sleepy, it might be indeed considered proved that she was not
Abracadabra. Besides, when I told her about Abracadabra’s visit, she was
very much vexed that she had missed her, and asked whether Abracadabra
had not left any present for her, which she had not. That is the first
clear and definite memory I have of Abracadabra, and also, in a way, it
is the last, for when next that amiable fairy visited us, I knew, alas,
that she was no fairy at all, but my mother, dressed in the amazing garb
of fairyland. But though that particular brand of fairyland was finished
for me, those subsequent occasions were girt with grandeur, for I,
concealing my own superior knowledge, must pretend that this was genuine
Abracadabra, thus indulging and buttressing the belief of my youngest
brother Hugh, who still, innocent thing, had no grown-up doubts on the
subject.... I found those selfsame garments only lately in a trunk
stowed away in an attic at the last home my mother lived in; a skirt
covered with sprays of artificial flowers, a bodice and stomacher set
with gems of pure glass, a hat of white satin embowered in flowers, a
pair of wings, gauze and gold, and a pair of high-heeled shoes covered
with gilt paper. They were moth-eaten and mouldy, and it was scarcely
possible for the most sentimental pilgrim to preserve them. Besides I
had the memory of the day when the authentic fairy appeared in them, and
that memory was sweeter than the condition, forty-five years later, of
the robes themselves. My mother had kept them, I make no doubt, when her
own days of Abracadabra were over by reason of our emergence from
childhood, in the hope that one day a daughter or daughter-in-law would
assume them again for the joy and mystification of grandchildren, but
that day never came. So the robes of fairyland stowed away in their
trunk were forgotten, until that day at Tremans when I found them, as I
turned out the treasures and the rubbish of the vanished years before
the house passed into other hands. It was a dark autumn day, and the
rain beat softly on the roof, but verily, when I opened the trunk and
found them there, the sunlight of the dawn of life shot level and
delicious rays from the far horizon, and cast a rainbow over the weeping
sky.
People in those very early days, with the exception of Beth, were more
part of the general landscape of life than human beings, similar in kind
to myself, with an individuality of their own. They were not loved or
feared: they were but a part of the general environment, like the walls
of the nursery, or trees or dinner or beds. But, as by some superior
swiftness of evolution, Beth ceased to be landscape, and became a human
being, wholly to be adored and generally to be obeyed, sooner than any
of the family. She was well over fifty when first I remember her, and
had by now almost completed the nursing of a second generation, for she
had been nursery-maid with Mrs. Sidgwick, my mother’s mother, when her
family came into the world, and had gone to my mother when at the mature
age of nineteen the first of her six children was born. Thereafter Beth
remained with my mother until the end of her long and utterly beautiful
life of love and service. Very soon after she came to my grandmother, at
the age of fifteen, she gave notice because she wanted to go back from
Rugby to her native Yorkshire, and did not settle into more southerly
ways. But my grandmother encouraged her to think that she soon would do
so, and so Beth, instead of leaving, stopped on till the age of
ninety-three, in an unbroken devotion to us of seventy-eight years. That
devotion was returned: we were all her children, and the darlingest of
all to Beth’s big heart was Hugh.
Beth then, to my sense, emerged first of all into the
[Illustration: MY MOTHER, AET. 20
[_Page 19_]
ranks of human beings, servant and friend and to a very considerable
extent mistress. But she gave us no weak and sentimental devotion, and
though she never inspired the smallest degree of fear, her rare
displeasure caused an awful feeling of loneliness and desolation. If we
had done wrong, she demanded sorrow before her forgiveness was granted,
and if to her wise mind the sorrow was not sufficiently sincere, she was
quite capable of saying, when we said we were sorry in too superficial a
manner, “I don’t want your sorrer,” and the day grew black, until she
accepted it and beamed forgiveness. That granted, there was never any
nagging, and next minute she would be running races with us again until
panting and bright-eyed she would stop and say, “Eh, dear, I can’t run
any more: I’ve got a bone in my leg.”
She mingles in almost every memory that I have of those days, a loved
and protecting presence. She it was who lifted me up to look out of the
nursery window when a sham fight was going on, perhaps at Aldershot.
There were reports of guns to be heard and, so I fancy, flashes and
wreaths of smoke, and like George III I got it firmly embedded in my
mind that this was the battle of Waterloo that I had witnessed. The
connection I think lay through the fact of this place being Wellington.
She it was who led me through a delicious sandy piece of waste ground
near the house called the Wilderness, and allowed me to pick and eat a
blackberry from a bramble that grew by a rubbish heap on which was a
broken plate. Never have I seen such a blackberry. I can still hardly
believe it was not of the size of an apricot, for I know it entirely
filled my mouth and the juice spurted therefrom as out of a wine-vat.
She too consoled me for the loss of two front teeth which came out into
a piece of butter-scotch that she had given me. She removed the teeth
and I proceeded with the toffee. She too allowed me to take out of the
Noah’s ark with which we played on Sundays a brown dog remotely
resembling a setter, two of whose legs had been broken. Her brilliant
surgery had repaired this loss by inserting in the stumps a couple of
pins so that it stood up as well as ever. This I was permitted to carry
about with me, partly in my pocket, but mostly in a warm damp hand,
which caused the setter to exude a pleasant smell of paint and varnish.
A moment of tragedy, the first that I had known, was the sequel, and I
do not believe that ever in my life I have been more utterly miserable.
What happened was this.
It was Christmas Eve, and the five of us, Martin, Arthur, Nellie,
Maggie, and myself--Hugh, so I guess, being then little more than a
month old--were returning from our walk, and the setter should have been
in my hand or in my pocket. We were going through a wood of fir trees,
the ground was brown and slippery with pineneedles, and the sun low and
red shone through the tall trunks making, with the fact that it was
Christmas Eve, an enchanted moment. I had just found out that my breath
steamed, as it came out of my mouth, and Beth and I were playing
steamers. Then suddenly I became aware that the setter was neither in my
hand nor my pocket, and the abomination of desolation descended on me.
For a little while we looked for it, and then Beth decreed that we must
go on. But Martin--this is the first thing that I can recollect about
him--being eleven years old and able to walk alone after dark, got leave
to stop behind and look for it, while the rest of the bereaved
procession went homewards. At that point my memory fails, and I have no
idea whether he found it or not. But here were the two first
crystallized emotions of my life; the black misery of the loss of the
setter, and the sense of Martin’s amazing kindness and bravery in
stopping behind by himself in the terrible wood. There was a moon in the
sky when we came out into the open and frosty stars, but no heart within
me to care for playing steamers any more that day.
Next morning, after nursery-breakfast, I went down to the dining-room,
and was given a cup of milk to drink by my father. This was an unusual
proceeding, and as I progressed towards the bottom of the cup he told me
to drink slowly. Something inside the cup clinked as I finished it, and
there was a shilling which was mine.
On Sunday morning, towards the end of the Wellington days, I went down
to breakfast in the dining-room. There were short prayers first, about
which I remember nothing except the sight of servants’ backs, kneeling
at chairs. But on one such morning, in the summer I suppose, because all
the windows were wide open, a very delightful thing happened. There was
a tame squirrel that used to scamper about the house, and run up and
down stairs, and on this occasion he suddenly descended from a curtain
rod, crossed the floor and scampered up the cook’s back. Probably she
pushed him off, for he chattered with rage and went and sat on the
sideboard and began nibbling ham.
After prayers were over, while breakfast was being brought up, it was my
task to go round the walls of the dining-room, where hung engravings of
eminent personages, and name them. There was the Prince Consort in
striped trousers with a bowler hat in his hand, the Duke of Wellington
in knee-breeches, the head and shoulders of Dr. Walford, a full length
of Dean Stanley, and Dr. Martin Routh in a wig reading a book. Round
the edge of this which I think must have been a mezzotint were various
small sketches of the said Dr. Martin Routh in other attitudes. Then
came the smell of sausages and the advent of two or three sixth form
boys who in turn breakfasted with my father. These were very glorious
persons and I marvelled at their condescension in coming. Once the head
of the school came, and following my father’s example I addressed him by
his surname (whatever it was) without the prefix of “Mister,” for which
omission I was corrected. But out of his magnificence he did not seem to
mind.
Slowly, as the mists of infancy dispersed through which like sundered
mountain-tops were seen these scattered incidents, a more panoramic
vision of life as a coherent whole made its appearance. There had been
vignettes, now of the Wilderness, now of my father’s study, now of the
nursery, with nothing except the continuous association with Beth to
bind them together. But now these scattered localities became parts of
one connected picture, and I could form some sort of complete idea of
the place. Most important was the house, the Master’s Lodge, a red brick
building standing in its own grounds. You entered through a gabled porch
into a broad passage, on one side of which lay my father’s study. Glass
doors separated this from the huge immensity of the hall, with my
mother’s sitting-room, the drawing-room and the dining-room opening out
of it. The stairs started in the centre of it and after one flight
separated into two, each of which led up into a gallery that skirted
three sides of the hall. Bedrooms opened out of this, also the day
nursery and night nursery, and pitch-pine banisters (a wood much admired
at that time) ran round it, and it was through these banisters that one
morning my sister Maggie, in a fit of wonderful audacity inserted her
foot, and exclaimed, “That’s my foot, Alleluia.” In the nursery, the
room with which I was chiefly concerned, was a rocking-horse with wide
red nostrils and movable pummels. These pummels penetrated right through
his dappled skin, and by removing them it was possible to drop small
objects like pebbles into his inside, where they rattled agreeably as he
rocked. Once some one of us, tempting Fate, held a penny at this
remarkable aperture, and the penny dropped inside, so that Beth had to
turn the rocking-horse upside down and shake him until it was restored
to currency again. There was a low deal table, quantities of lead
soldiers, and a swing hung from the ceiling, so that altogether it
presented most agreeable features. There was also a large cupboard where
playthings must be put away when they were done with, and I remember
with excitement a Homeric struggle that took place there between Martin
and Arthur for the possession of a stick which was painted blue and red.
But the most remarkable feature of the nursery was its walls, which, by
the time we left Wellington, were entirely covered with pictures. These
pictures we children used to cut out on wet days from old illustrated
papers under my father’s supervision, and he, clad in a dressing-gown to
defend his clothes from splashes of paste, fixed them up on the walls,
till the entire surface was covered. He had a step-ladder on which he
attacked the higher altitudes, and a roller with which he pressed down
the affixed pictures to the wall. There were battles there and
historical scenes, notable buildings, and numerous cartoons from
_Punch_. But one ought never to have been put there, for I dreaded
seeing it, and, like a child, kept my dread to myself. It was the
outcome, I imagine, of some enquiry into sweated trades, and represented
a dressmaker talking to a client and saying, “I wouldn’t disappoint your
ladyship for anything,” or words to that effect. At the back was a
glimpse into her workroom, and there falling backwards with closed eyes
was a girl, fainting I suppose in the artist’s intention, but I knew
better and was aware that she was dead. Nightmares pictured her as
falling across my bed in the sleeping-nursery next door, and Beth, in
her frilled nightcap came close and said, “Now, dear, go to sleep again.
I’m taking care of you.” Doors in the hall led I suppose to kitchens and
servants’ bedrooms, but of these I remember nothing except the fact of a
flagged passage and the smell of a store-cupboard to which I once went
with my mother. That part of the house did not matter.
Outside, the lawn was spread round two sides of the house; if you
crossed it, you found a wicket-gate in a fence that bordered the belt of
trees where the gardener cast the dead adder, and through this you
passed to the kitchen garden. On the right of the lawn below the trees
stood a summer-house where the croquet mallets were kept, and through
these trees was a path that led out into the school playing fields. A
gravel sweep faced the front door; there were laburnums and
rhododendrons by the gate, to the right lay the Wilderness and straight
in front the College buildings with the spired chapel at the far end.
Somewhere in these buildings was the school library, only notable
because it contained a glass case in which was a white ant. Below the
playing fields lay two immeasurable lakes, in the lower of which was the
school bathing-place: the upper, though also immeasurable, was smaller,
and a waterfall of gigantic height severed the two. By degrees the same
world extended even further than that, for by walking laboriously you
could reach either of two hills called Edgebarrow and Ambarrow, and then
it was time to come home again.
Simultaneously with this growing reality of the world, its inhabitants
(still with the exception of my father) assumed an individuality of
their own. Far the most individual of them was my mother, who seemed to
live entirely for pleasure except when she taught us our lessons. She
played croquet with consummate skill, she drove herself in a pony
carriage, she put on a low shining dress every evening with turquoise
brooches and bracelets, and had as much eau-de-Cologne as she wished on
her handkerchief. When she was dressing for dinner we used to go into
her room, examine that Golconda of a jewel-case, and bring her clean
handkerchiefs of our own still folded up, for her to “make moons” on
them, as the phrase was, with eau-de-Cologne. She took the stopper out
of the bottle, and reversed it on to these folded handkerchiefs, making
three or four applications. Then we unfolded these odorous
handkerchiefs, held them up to the light, and lo, they were penetrated
with full wet moons of eau-de-Cologne. She was, too, enormously wealthy,
for every Saturday we went to see her in her sitting-room, and she
opened the front of her inlaid Italian cabinet, and drew from one of the
pigeon-holes within, a little wicker-basket, and out of it paid our
weekly allowances. For elders there was as much as sixpence, but
sixpences came out of a japanned cash-box, for juniors there was
twopence or a penny according to age, and all these pennies, infinite
apparently in number came out of the wicker-basket. She had a rosewood
work-box, lined with red silk, which contained what was known as her
“treasures.” These were two white china elephants with gilded feet, a
small silk parasol, the ferrule of which was a pencil, an amber
necklace, a cornelian heart, and boxes that made loud pops when you
opened them. If any of us had a cold, or some ailment that kept us
indoors, we were allowed to play with her treasures, to while away the
solitude. But for some reason I did not think much of the treasures, and
after being consoled with them during an afternoon indoors gave vent to
the appalling criticism, “What Mamma calls tessors, I call ’Ubbish.” But
that, as far as I know, was the only disloyalty of which I was ever
guilty with regard to her. I just did not care about that particular
sort of treasures.
What a life was hers! She ordered lunch and dinner precisely as she
chose; she had a silver card-case with cards in it, stating who she was
and where she was, and we all belonged to her, and so in some dim way
did my father, and even the biggest boys of the great sixth form itself
touched their caps to her as she passed. And slowly, slowly I became
aware that she was worthy of all these pleasures and this homage.
There were certainly lessons in those days, I suppose for about an hour
a day. There was a book called _Reading without Tears_, which said that
a-b was “ab,” and d-o-g was “dog.” There must have been certain crises
over this learning for I was kept in instead of going out one day, and,
with the fatal habit of inversion which has clung to me all my life,
said, so my mother told me, “I call it tears without reading!” I record
this anecdote in pure self-condemnation: I don’t suppose I knew that
this _obiter dictum_ made sense; it was only the beginning of a habit to
play about with words, and see to what fashion of affairs they could be
suited. Every morning also, when we came downstairs we went into my
mother’s sitting-room, and learned a new verse of a Psalm, repeating the
verses previously learned. The Twenty-Third Psalm was one of these, and
the Ninety-First I think must have been another, since I cannot remember
the time when I did not know it by heart. I do not think that these
religious repetitions meant anything to me; they were part of the
inevitable day, which was full of glee.
That my mother had any other life of her own, full as I know it to have
been of worries and anxieties and of marvellous happinesses, never, as
was natural, occurred to any of us. She was, as far as concerns my
memory of her at Wellington, a glorious sunlit figure, living a life
that appeared to be the apotheosis of hedonism, the mistress of a
shouting houseful of children, all wilful, all set on having their own
way, and she calmly ruled us all, without even letting us know that we
were being ruled. All the time she was a very young woman married to a
man twelve years her senior who was as violently individual as anyone
could be. But for us she floated there like the moons of eau-de-Cologne
which embellished our handkerchiefs, carrying something of the fairyhood
of Abracadabra, and all the wizardry of her own inimitable wisdom. After
Beth it was she who first emerged out of the landscape which once
embraced trees and people alike, and to us soared upwards like a rising
constellation. She could not take Beth’s place, for Beth filled that,
but she enlarged a child’s heart, and dwelt there. She never ceased from
her own enlargements: in my mother’s house there were many mansions.
There were mansions for everybody, and none of the tenants usurped the
place of another. As we grew up, all of us, without exception, felt that
we were especially hers, and were in a unique relation to her. We were
all quite right about that, and so were a myriad friends of hers. There
was “the best room” for each of them. How she did it, how she conveyed
that adorable truth I know now, because I know that love is of infinite
dimensions, and has the same perfect room for all. But the childish
instinct was right: she cared supremely, and gave her whole heart to
each of us.
My sisters, presently to be kindled for me with a great illumination,
were for the period of the Wellington days quite dim, so too were Martin
and Arthur now at a private school at East Sheen, where, some years
later, I followed them, and the rest of the world at that time consisted
of vague visitors, among whom were my mother’s three brothers, William,
Henry, and Arthur Sidgwick (remarkable only for their beards and their
use of tobacco), and her mother, who is a much clearer figure. She
encouraged small visitors when she was dressing for dinner, was generous
in making moons, and had a ritual with regard to the dressing of her
hair which filled me with wonder. It was parted in the middle and she
drew down two strands of it over the top of her ears, and holding each
of these in place applied to it a stick of brown cosmetic which I now
know to have been bandoline. The effect of this was that the hair stuck
together in the manner of a thin board, absolutely smooth and in one
piece. Sometimes a crack or fissure appeared in it, and more bandoline
was employed. It formed in fact a little stiff roof, and on the top she
put a lace cap. She had long chains round her neck, and carried a silver
vinaigrette containing a small piece of sponge soaked in aromatic
vinegar. It was chiefly used in chapel when she was standing up during
the Psalms. On the other side of the family there were three aunts who
corresponded with the three uncles, sisters of my father, two of whom
were very handsome and of a high colour; the third, Aunt Ada, seemed to
me to be like a horse. They all floated in a sort of remote ether, like
clouds coming up and passing again.