And very vain about his clothes!”
I objected:
“Not at all, Susannah! Neat and cleanly!”
She corrected:
“And neat and cleanly in his clothes,”
which shows the value of literary criticism.
Then the poem went through with the circumstances of the Portate Ultimatum, the Hannah Atkins plot, and the sequel of those complications.
“And everything was in a muss,
And so he ran away with us.”
Now, from that point on, it went along something like a diary. It recorded daily incidents, reflections, comments, the shades and modifications of Susannah's opinion of me. It was minute, microscopic, and detailed. It went into unsuspected corners, and hauled things out, and delivered judgments on them. If the book of the Recording Angel is put together on that model, it's surely a good model. Perhaps the first sight of the record and analysis will make a man squirm. But I wouldn't ask for a better Recording Angel than Susannah, or a judge on the whole more just. But that is not the main value of the poem to me. It began to strike me in a new light when I discovered that Susannah had my sins on her conscience.