But I don’t think she did follow me. We took two or three turns up and down the lawn in silence.
“How is your paper doing?” she asked at last.
I told her with a great show of enthusiasm about the cross between Angoras and Himalayans which we had just announced.
“I often wish,” she said after a pause, “that you had accepted the college’s offer. It would have been so good to have you here, filling the place your dear father occupied.”
She looked at me sadly. I smiled back at her as though from across a gulf. The child, I thought, grows up to forget that he is of the same flesh with his parents; but they do not forget. I wished, for her sake, that I were only five years old.
CHAPTER IV
At five years old, among other things, I used to write poems which my mother thoroughly and whole-heartedly enjoyed. There was one about larks which she still preserves, along with the locks of my pale childish hair, the faded photographs, the precocious drawings of railway trains and all the other relics of the period.
Oh, lark, how you do fly
Right up into the sky.