526 PRÆTERITA-III

never a word, but we continue to take stock of each other. “I thought you so ugly,” she told me, afterwards. She didn’t quite mean that; but only, her mother having talked much of my “greatness” to her, she had expected me to be something like Garibaldi, or the Elgin Theseus; and was extremely disappointed.

I expressed myself as ready to try what I could make of Rosie; only I couldn’t come every other day all the way in to Green Street. Mamma asked what sort of a road there was to Denmark Hill? I explained the simplicity and beauty of its ramifications round the “Elephant and Castle,” and how one was quite in the country as soon as one got past the triangular field at Champion Hill. And the wildernesses of the Obelisk having been mapped out, and determined to be passable, the day was really appointed for first lesson at Denmark Hill-and Emily came with her sister.

53. Emily was a perfectly sweet, serene, delicately-chiselled marble nymph of fourteen, softly dark-eyed, rightly tender and graceful in all she did and said. I never saw such a faculty for the arrangement of things beautifully, in any other human being. If she took up a handful of flowers, they fell out of her hand in wreathed jewellery of colour and form, as if they had been sown, and had blossomed, to live together so, and no otherwise. Her mother had the same gift, but in its more witty, thoughtful, and scientific range; in Emily it was pure wild instinct. For an Irish girl, she was not witty, for she could not make a mistake; one never laughed at what she said, but the room was brighter for it. To Rose and me she soon became no more Emily, but “Wisie,” named after my dead Wisie.¹ All the children, and their father, loved animals;-my first sight of papa was as he caressed a green popinjay which was almost hiding itself in his waistcoat. Emily’s pony, Swallow, and Rosie’s dog, Bruno, will have their day in these memoirs;² but Emily’s “Bully”

¹ [See above, p. 501.]

² [The memoirs were suspended, however, before the day came.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]