She had three little boys, who were turned out three times a day in the ultimate state of good behaviour, tidiness, and cleanliness, and who lapsed three times a day into a state of original sin combined with tar and ship’s grease.  These three little boys pervaded the vessel with an innocent smile on their three little faces, their mother’s winning smile.  Every man on the ship was their own familiar friend, bound to them by little interchanges of biscuits, confidences, twine, and by that electric smile which their mother communicated, and from which no one wished to be insulated.  Yes, they quite pervaded the vessel, these three little innocents, flying that bright and friendly smile; and there was no description of mischief suitable for three very little boys that they did not exhaust.  The ingenuity they squandered every day in doing a hundred things which they ought not to have done was perfectly marvellous.  Before the voyage was half over we thought there was nothing left for them to do; but we were entirely mistaken.  The daily round, a common cask would furnish all they had to ask; to them the meanest whistle that blows, or a pocket-knife, could give thoughts that too often led to smiles and tears.

Their mother’s thoughts were ever with them; but she was like a hen with a brood of ducklings.  They passed out of her element, and only returned as hunger called them.  When they did return she was all that soap and water, loving reproaches, and tender appeals could be; and as they were very affectionate little boys, they were for the time thoroughly cleansed morally and physically, and sealed with the absolution of kisses.

I saw her three years afterwards in England.  She was living in lodgings near a school which her boys attended.  She looked careworn.  Her relations had been kind to her, but not warmly affectionate.  She had been disappointed with the welcome they had given her.  They seemed changed to her, more formal, narrower, colder.  She longed to be back in India; to be with her husband once more.  But he was engrossed with his work.  He wrote short letters enclosing cheques; but he never said that he missed her, that he longed to see her again, that she must come out to him, or that he must go to her.  He could not have grown cold too?  No, he was busy; he had never been demonstrative in his affection; this was his way.  And she was anxious about the boys.  She did not know whether they were really getting on, whether she was doing the best for them, whether their father would be satisfied.  She had no friends near her, no one to speak to; so she brooded over these problems, exaggerated them, and fretted.

The husband was a man who lived in his own thoughts, and his thoughts were book thoughts.  The world of leaf and bird, the circumambient firmament of music and light, shone in upon him through books.  A book was the master key that unlocked all his senses, that unfolded the varied landscape, animated the hero, painted the flower, swelled the orchestra of wind and ocean, peopled the plains of India with starvelings and the mountains of Afghanistan with cut-throats.  Without a book he moved about like a shadow lost in some dim dreamland of echoes.