V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON 101

115. Extremely good, and, in the gentlest way;-entirely simple, meek, loving, and serious; not clever enough to be any way naughty, but saved from being stupid by a vivid nature, full of enthusiasm like her husband’s. Both of them evangelically pious, in a vivid, not virulent, way; and each of them sacredly, no less than passionately, in love with the other, they were the entirely best-matched pair I have yet seen in this match-making world and dispensation. Yet, as fate would have it, they had the one grief of having no children, which caused it, in years to come, to be Mrs. Gray’s principal occupation in life to spoil me. By the time I was old enough to be spoiled, Mr. Gray, having fairly prospered in business, and come to London, was established, with his wife, her mother, and her mother’s white French poodle, Petite, in a dignified house in Camberwell Grove. An entirely happy family; old Mrs. Monro¹ as sweet as her daughter, perhaps slightly wiser; Richard rejoicing in them both with all his heart; and Petite, having, perhaps, as much sense as any two of them, delighted in, and beloved by all three.

116. Their house was near the top of the Grove,- which was a real grove in those days, and a grand one, some three-quarters of a mile long, steepishly down hill,- beautiful in perspective as an unprecedentedly “long-drawn aisle”;² trees, elm, wych elm, sycamore and aspen, the branches meeting at top; the houses on each side with trim stone pathways up to them, through small plots of well-mown grass; three or four storied, mostly in grouped terraces,-well-built, of sober-coloured brick, with high and steep slated roof-not gabled, but polygonal; all well to do, well kept, well broomed, dignifiedly and pleasantly vulgar, and their own Grove-world all in all to them. It was a pleasant mile and a furlong or two’s walk from Herne Hill to the Grove; and whenever Mrs. Gray and my mother had anything to say to each other, they walked-

¹ [For her death, and for the subsequent fortunes of the Gray family, see ii. § 6 (below, p. 247).]

² [Gray’s Elegy, stanza 10: quoted also in Vol. XXIII. p. 28.]

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