in which we used to see passing up and down, obliquely raised towards the
heavens, her handsome face with its brown and wrinkled cheeks, which with
age had acquired almost the purple hue of tilled fields in autumn,
covered, if she were walking abroad, by a half-lifted veil, while upon
them either the cold or some sad reflection invariably left the drying
traces of an involuntary tear.

My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma
would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted
for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the moment in which
I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden
dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw,
rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the
keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night that I reached the
stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong
the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared.
Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to
call her back, to say to her "Kiss me just once again," but I knew that
then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made
to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with this kiss of
peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and
she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom
of having her there at all, which was a very different thing from letting
the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was
already crossing the threshold. And to see her look displeased destroyed
all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a moment before, when she
bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a Host,
for an act of Communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of
her real presence, and with it the power to sleep. But those evenings on
which Mamma stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed compared