She sat in the little parlour, which she had been made to take into use by Vassie, who had successfully made it hideous with antimacassars and vases of artificial flowers.  As Annie sat rigidly upright upon a slippery horsehair-covered chair, her eyes wandered vaguely here and there and fell on the album in which Vassie had collected all the photographs taken of the family from time to time.  Photographs printed on paper were only just beginning to supersede the older daguerreotypes, and a gleam of interest came into Annie’s pale blue eyes, for the album was still a new toy to her.  She remembered that Vassie had only lately finished sticking in the last photographs, and, picking it up, she began turning the pages.

There was Archelaus ... she caught her breath.  Her lovely Archelaus as he had appeared before going off to that terrible Crimea, which Annie always thought was so called because it was such a wicked place.  The print was not very clear, as it was only a copy made from the original daguerreotype, but what it lacked in definition Annie’s memory could supply.  Archelaus was standing with one elbow leaning upon a rustic pillar; he wore his uniform and looked like a king.  He had splendid side-whiskers, though their yellow hue did not show in the photograph.  Her beautiful Archelaus ... now toiling and moiling in those terrible deserts, those sandy places, of Australia, which was the underside of the world, where black heathen went about mother-naked.  By now he had doubtless dug much gold—­many, many sovereigns of it—­out of the sand, and perhaps some day very soon he would walk in with his pockets full of it; and then who would cut a dash in the country-side, from Land’s End up to Truro and beyond it?  Her Archelaus.  Even in her dreams Annie did not picture Archelaus pouring out his gold upon her or as being anything but of a splendid masculine surliness.

She turned a page and came on John-James—­reluctant, bashful, glowering at the camera ... he was the most dutiful of her children, and she passed on carelessly and came to Tom.  Sleek and shiny in black broadcloth, with the foxy sharpness of his features somehow suggesting the red of his colouring even in the photograph....  He was sitting in a low plush chair with Vassie standing, after the ungallant fashion of the pictures of the period, behind him, one hand on his shoulder.  She looked a swelling twenty, though she had only been seventeen when it was taken.  Another turn of the page and Annie saw herself—­an unkind vision, at her most set, hard of hair and jaw, with deep eye-sockets.  She admired it for the black gown and the lace handkerchief she was holding; but she was interested in it, too, as the true egoist always is in self-portraiture, however unflattering.