Her figure especially showed no signs of
age, and if she and her daughters were in the room it was she I
admired.
One day, while seeking through the store-room for a sheet of brown
paper to pack up a book in, I came across a pile of old
_Athenaeums_. Had I happened upon a set of drawings by Raphael I
could not have been more astonished. Not one, but twenty copies of the
_Athenaeum_ in a house where never a book was read. I looked at
the dates--three-and-thirty years ago. At that moment she was
gathering some withering apples from the floor.
"Whoever," I cried, "could have left these copies of the
_Athenaeum_ here?"
"Oh, they are my _Athenaeums_," she said. "I always used to read
the _Athenaeum_ when I was engaged to be married to Mr. Bartlett.
You must have heard of him--he wrote that famous book about the
Euphrates. I was very fond of reading in those days, and he and I used
to talk about books in the old garden at Wandsworth. It is all built
over now."
This sudden discovery of dead tastes and sympathies seemed to draw us
closer together, and in the quietness of the store-room, amid the
odour of the apples, her face flushed with all the spirit of her
girlhood, and I understood her as if I had lived it with her.
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