might perhaps feel.

VII

My mother died suddenly and, it was thought by Lady Drew,
inconsiderately, the following spring. Her ladyship instantly fled to
Folkestone with Miss Somerville and Fison, until the funeral should be
over and my mother's successor installed.

My uncle took me over to the funeral. I remember there was a sort of
prolonged crisis in the days preceding this because, directly he heard
of my loss, he had sent a pair of check trousers to the Judkins people
in London to be dyed black, and they did not come back in time. He
became very excited on the third day, and sent a number of increasingly
fiery telegrams without any result whatever, and succumbed next morning
with a very ill grace to my aunt Susan's insistence upon the resources
of his dress-suit. In my memory those black legs of his, in a
particularly thin and shiny black cloth--for evidently his dress-suit
dated from adolescent and slenderer days--straddle like the Colossus
of Rhodes over my approach to my mother's funeral. Moreover, I was
inconvenienced and distracted by a silk hat he had bought me, my first
silk hat, much ennobled, as his was also, by a deep mourning band.

I remember, but rather indistinctly, my mother's white paneled
housekeeper's room and the touch of oddness about it that she was not
there, and the various familiar faces made strange by black, and I seem
to recall the exaggerated self-consciousness that arose out of their
focussed attention. No doubt the sense of the new silk hat came and went
and came again in my emotional chaos. Then something comes out clear and
sorrowful, rises out clear and sheer from among all these rather base