“She told me she had never had enough circulation to have good spirits herself and that her old nurse often said: 

“‘No one should ever be surprised at anything they feel.’

“My mamma came of an unintellectual family and belonged to a generation in which it was not the fashion to read.  She had lived in a small milieu most of her life, without the opportunity of meeting distinguished people.  She had great powers of observation and a certain delicate acuteness of expression which identified all she said with herself.  She was fine-mouche and full of tender humour, a woman of the world, but entirely bereft of worldliness.

“Her twelve children, who took up all her time, accounted for some of her a quoi bon attitude towards life, but she had little or no concentration and a feminine mind both in its purity and inconsequence.

“My mother hardly had one intimate friend and never allowed any one to feel necessary to her.  Most people thought her gentle to docility and full of quiet composure.  So much is this the general impression that, out of nearly a hundred letters which I received, there is not one that does not allude to her restful nature.  As a matter of fact, Mamma was one of the most restless creatures that ever lived.  She moved from room to room, table to table, and topic to topic, not, it is true, with haste or fretfulness, but with no concentration of either thought or purpose; and I never saw her put up her feet in my life.

“Her want of confidence in herself and of grip upon life prevented her from having the influence which her experience of the world and real insight might have given her; and her want of expansion prevented her own generation and discouraged ours from approaching her closely.

“Few women have speculative minds nor can they deliberate:  they have instincts, quick apprehensions and powers of observation; but they are seldom imaginative and neither their logic nor their reason are their strong points.  Mamma was in all these ways like the rest of her sex.

“She had much affection for, but hardly any pride in her children.  Laura’s genius was a phrase to her; and any praise of Charty’s looks or Lucy’s successes she took as mere courtesy on the part of the speaker.  I can never remember her praising me, except to say that I had social courage, nor did she ever encourage me to draw, write or play the piano.

“She marked in a French translation of “The Imitation of Christ” which Lucy gave her: 

“’Certes au jour du jugement on ne nous demandera point ce que nous avons lu, mais ce que nous avons fait; ni si nous avons bien parle mais si nous avons bien vecu.’

“She was the least self-centred and self-scanned of human beings, unworldly and uncomplaining.  As Doll Liddell says in his admirable letter to me, ‘She was often wise and always gracious.’”

CHAPTER II