This is all a digression, however, from the fact that
I have been six months at home and am weary of it, and
pleased at the new development of which I shall have to
tell you. The practice here, although unremunerative, is
very busy with its three-and-sixpenny visits and guinea
confinements, so that both the governor and I have had
plenty to do. You know how I admire him, and yet I fear
there is little intellectual sympathy between us. He
appears to think that those opinions of mine upon
religion and politics which come hot from my inmost soul
have been assumed either out of indifference or bravado.
So I have ceased to talk on vital subjects with him,
and, though we affect to ignore it, we both know
that there is a barrier there. Now, with my mother--ah,
but my mother must have a paragraph to herself.
You met her, Bertie! You must remember her sweet
face, her sensitive mouth, her peering, short-sighted
eyes, her general suggestion of a plump little hen, who
is still on the alert about her chickens. But you cannot
realise all that she is to me in our domestic life.
Those helpful fingers! That sympathetic brain! Ever
since I can remember her she has been the quaintest
mixture of the housewife and the woman of letters, with
the highbred spirited lady as a basis for either
character. Always a lady, whether she was bargaining
with the butcher, or breaking in a skittish charwoman, or
stirring the porridge, which I can see her doing with the
porridge-stick in one hand, and the other holding her
Revue des deux Mondes within two inches of her dear
nose.
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