“What a blessing that is! And by-and-by she will meet some one else, who will interest her even more than her baby, and she will marry again. She is too young to go on grieving for ever. Don’t you think so, Mrs. Porter?”
“Yes, I suppose she will forget sooner or later. Most women have a faculty for forgetting.”
“Most women, but not all women,” said Cuthbert, with his earnest air, which made the commonest words mean more from him than from other men. “I do not think you would be the kind of woman to forget very quickly, Mrs. Porter.”
She was in no hurry to notice this remark, but went on pouring out tea quietly for a minute or two before she replied.
“There is not much room in my life for forgetfulness,” she said, after that protracted pause. “So without being in any way an exceptional person, I may lay claim to a good memory.”
“She remembers her daughter, and yet memory does not soften her heart,” thought Theodore. “With her, memory means implacability.”
He looked round the room, in the flickering light of the sunshine that crept in between the bars of the Venetian shutters. He had not expected ever to be sitting at his ease in Mrs. Porter’s parlour after that unpromising conversation upon the first day of the year. He looked round the room, thoughtfully contemplative of every detail in its arrangement which served to tell him what manner of woman Mrs. Porter was. He was not a close student of character like Ramsay; he had made for himself no scientific code of human expression in eye and lip and head and hand; but it seemed to him always that the room in which a man or a woman lived gave a useful indication of that man’s or that woman’s mental qualities.
This room testified that its mistress was a lady. The furniture was heterogeneous—shabby for the most part, from an upholsterer’s point of view, old-fashioned without being antique; but there was nevertheless a cachet upon every object which told that it had been chosen by a person of taste, from the tall Chippendale bureau which filled one corner of the room, to the solid carved oak table which held the tea-tray. The ornaments were few, but they were old china, and china of some mark from the collector’s point of view; the draperies were of Madras muslin, spotless, and fresh as a spring morning. Theodore noticed, however, that there were no flowers in the vases, and none of those scattered trifles which usually mark the presence of refined womanhood. The room would have had a bare and chilly aspect, lacking these things, if it had not been for a few pictures, and for the bookshelves, which were filled with handsomely bound books.
“You have a nice library, Mrs. Porter,” he said, somewhat aimlessly, as he took a cup of tea from her hands. “I suppose you are a great reader?”
“Yes, I read a great deal. I have my books and my garden. Those make up my sum of life.”