unforgettably.

As I remember them together they chafed constantly. Her attitude to
nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical
disapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to me and
not to her. "YOUR father," she used to call him, as though I had
got him for her.

She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally self-
subsisting before her marriage. Even in those Herne Hill days I
used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old
speculative curiosity return as I write this. She took a
considerable interest in the housework that our generally
servantless condition put upon her--she used to have a charwoman in
two or three times a week--but she did not do it with any great
skill. She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting
covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment. The
Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was
crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with
the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the
veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal dread of "blacks"
by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were
rarely open.

She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the
headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I
think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in
railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the
Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do
not think she opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that