Was it the gown or the piece of black
lace that she wore on her head, or the Victorian earrings that hung
from her ears down her dust-coloured neck, that gave her a sort of
bygone appearance, the look of an old photograph? Her manners took me
farther back in the century even than the photograph did; she seemed
to have come out of the pages of some trite and uninteresting novel, a
rather listless book written at the end of the eighteenth century,
before the art of novel-writing had been found out. She listened, and
her listening was in itself a politeness, and she never lost her
politeness, though she seldom understood what I said. When I finished
speaking she answered what I had said indirectly, like one whose mind
was not quite capable of following any conversation except the most
trite. She laughed if she thought I had said anything humourous, and
sometimes looked a little embarrassed; she only seemed to be at her
ease when speaking of her mother. If, for instance, we were speaking
of books, she would break in with her mother's opinions, thinking it
wonderful that her mother had read--shall we say, "The Three
Musketeers?" three times. She was interested in all her mother's
characteristics, and her habit was to speak of her mother as her
mamma.
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