"'What is it about?' I asked. 'What is so wonderful and funny?'
"'Oh, my dear,' she said, breaking again into laughter, 'it is nothing! It is the most ridiculous thing! I was only trying to translate "fiddle-de-dee" into Greek!'"
This was in her ninety-second year.
But we are still at the breakfast table. Sometimes there were guests at breakfast, a famous actor, a travelling scholar, caught between other engagements for this one leisure hour.
It was a good deal, perhaps, to ask people to leave a warm hotel on a January morning; but it was warm enough by the soft-coal blaze of the dining-room fire. Over the coffee and rolls, sausages and buckwheat cakes, leisure reigned supreme; not the poet's "retired leisure," but a friendly and laughter-loving deity. Everybody was full of engagements, harried with work, pursued by business and pleasure: no matter! the talk ranged high and far, and the morning was half gone before they separated.
Soon after breakfast came the game of ball, played à deux with daughter or grandchild; the ball was tossed back and forth, the players counting meanwhile up to ten in various languages. She delighted in adding to her vocabulary of numerals, and it was a good day when she mastered those of the Kutch-Kutch Esquimaux.
Then came the walk, gallantly taken in every weather save the very worst. She battled with the west wind, getting the matter over as quickly as might be. "It is for my life!" she would say. But on quiet, sunny days she loved to linger along Commonwealth Avenue, watching the parade of babies and little children, stopping to admire this one or chat with that.
This function accomplished, she went straight to her desk, and "P. T." reigned till noon. It was a less rigorous "P. T." than that of our childhood. She could break off in a moment now, give herself entirely, joyously, to the question of dinner for the expected guest, of dress for the afternoon reception, then drop back into Aristotle or Æschylus with a happy sigh. It was less easy to break off when she was writing; we might be begged for "half a moment," as if our time were fully as precious as her own; but there was none of the distress that interruption brought in earlier years. Perhaps she took her writing less seriously. She often said, "Oh, my dear, I am beginning to realize at last that I shall never write my book now, my Magnum Opus, that was to be so great!"
She practised her scales faithfully every day, through the later years. Then she would play snatches of forgotten operas, and the granddaughter would hear her—if she thought no one was near—singing the brilliant arias in "a sweet thread of a voice."
After her practising, if she were alone, she would sit at the window and play her Twilight Game: counting the "passing," one for a biped, two for a quadruped, ten for a white horse, and so on.