The men of our family (my father's family, my mother is Irish) have always had strong wills. I have a strong will myself.
People say I am like the picture of my great-grandfather (the great-great-great-nephew of the ghost). He must have been a wonderful old gentleman by all accounts. Sometimes nurse says to us, "Have your own way, and you'll live the longer," and it always makes me think of great-grandfather, who had so much of his own way, and lived to be nearly a hundred.
I remember my father telling us how his sisters had to visit their old granny for months at a time, and how he shut the shutters at three o'clock on summer afternoons, and made them play dummy whist by candle light.
"Didn't you and your brothers go?" asked Uncle Patrick, across the dinner-table. My father laughed.
"Not we! My mother got us there once—but never again."
"And did your sisters like it?"
"Like it? They used to cry their hearts out. I really believe it killed poor Jane. She was consumptive and chilly, but always craving for fresh air; and granny never would have open windows, for fear of draughts on his bald head; and yet the girls had no fires in their room, because young people shouldn't be pampered."
"And ye never-r offer-r-ed—neither of ye—to go in the stead of them?"
When Uncle Patrick rolls his R's in a discussion, my mother becomes nervous.