“You are very like my wife.”
And once he called her “Anne.”
Yet another side to Gran’papa! Laura, as she dusted the drawing-room, would find herself pausing thoughtfully, wasting long minutes, before the faded crayon on the bamboo easel. The youthful, slim-waisted man, with the ringlets and Roman nose and serious eyes, who reminded her of David Copperfield and the Duke of Wellington, was, not nominally but really, Gran’papa: that was the strange part of it. Gran’papa, behind his shell of white hair, and trembling hands, and hectorings, and fidgetiness, was—not a habit, not an institution—but a man.... There was a closer tie between them than the accident of kinship: they were knit by the common experience of their common humanity.... He was a man and she was a woman.... He knew—incredible that Gran’papa should know—all that she knew.... He had loved ‘Anne,’ who was her little old dead grandmother.... She remembered hints of Aunt Adela—scraps of stories about a courtship that had not been all plain sailing.... He, Gran’papa upstairs, knew then what pain meant—knew as well as Laura the sickness of uncertainty ... the unnerving hopes and fears ... knew how like a stone one’s heart could lie in one’s breast.
She remembered again—it had been so forgotten—the day Grandmamma died. Gran’papa had sat all the morning in the dining-room, instead of in his room, which made it strange enough. Gran’papa—cold, aloof Gran’papa—had been stranger still. He had sat bowed over the fire, with his big silk handkerchief in his hand. With a sort of horror Laura had watched him, had seen that he was crying. He had looked up at her then and had said—she remembered his voice and his words—“Forty years—forty years—” over and over again. And then kindly, as if he knew she were frightened—“You’ve never seen a man cry, have you, child?” And Aunt Adela had said “Papa!” in a queer, warning voice.
That was all she remembered. But the words would not leave her as she rubbed the shining chair legs and pounded ostentatiously up and down the key-board, to assure Aunt Adela, if Aunt Adela should be on the alert, that she was dusting properly.
“A man”—not “Your grandfather.”... “A man”.... “My wife”....
So Gran’papa thought of himself as a man still.... He was a man.... The years they had passed on earth, eighteen or eighty, could alter their bodies, but not their souls.... Gran’papa’s soul—if she win through this barrier of his old and dying body to it—was as young as hers.... And hers as old as his.... A soul hadn’t any age ... or reckoned its age, not by years, but by wisdom, more or less, that its years had taught it.... And so—why shouldn’t they talk to each other? Gran’papa might help her.... She might ease Gran’papa.... For so long he had had no one to whom to tell his thoughts....
She would come up thoughtfully after her housework to spend the hour before lunch with him, to listen or to share his silence and to talk to him sometimes in her turn, jerkily, by fits and starts. She never knew how much he heard.
And then one day, quite suddenly, he took out his big pocket-book and showed her, wrapped in tissue, a strand of hair, a long coil that shone like old gold in the winter sunshine.
“She had beautiful hair,” said Gran’papa.