"SARDONYX"
she gloried in it; and to her thorough apprehension and management of their joint lives and all that came of them, as well as to her beauty and sense and genial warmth, was due her great popularity for many years in an immense and ever-widening circle, where the memory of her is still preserved and cherished as one of the most remarkable women of her time.
With all this power of passionate self-surrender to her husband in all things, little and big, she was not of the type that cannot see the faults of the beloved one, and Barty was very often frankly pulled up for his shortcomings, and by no means had it all his own way when his own way wasn't good for him. She was a person to reckon with, and incapable of the slightest flattery, even to Barty, who was so fond of it from her, and in spite of her unbounded admiration for him.
Such was your mother, my dear Roberta, in the bloom of her early twenties and ever after; till her death, in fact—on the day following his!
Somewhere about the spring of 1863 she said to me:
"Bob, Barty has written a book. Either I'm an idiot, or blinded by conjugal conceit, or else Barty's book—which I've copied out myself in my very best handwriting—is one of the most beautiful and important books ever written. Come and dine with me to-night; Barty's dining in the City with the Fishmongers—you shall have what you like best: pickled pork and pease-pudding, a dressed crab and a Welsh rabbit to follow, and draught stout—and after dinner I will read you the beginning of Sardonyx—that's what he's called it—and I should like to have your opinion."
I dined with her as she wished. We were alone, and she told me how he wrote every night in bed, in a kind of ecstasy—between two and four, in Blaze—and then elaborated his work during the day, and made sketches for it.
And after dinner she read me the first part of Sardonyx; it took three hours.