Yet it is clear that she, as well as Michael, loved the give-and-take of social intercourse within their circle. She too liked to catch up and pass on an amusing story about a contemporary, and thoroughly enjoyed a joke. After the austere Bristol days, when their gravity might have been at least a thousand years old, they grew steadily younger through the next fifteen years. “Michael had,” says Father John Gray, “the look, the laugh, and many of the thoughts of a child.” Both were witty, but Michael, the richer and more spontaneous nature, had a warm gift of humour almost Rabelaisian. She loved fun, and jesting, and mimicry. With her frequent smile, her sparkling eyes, and her emphatic tones and gestures, she was an extremely animated storyteller. Henry’s wit had a more intellectual quality: it was quicker and sharper in edge than Michael’s, and it grew keener as she grew older, till it acquired almost a touch of grimness, as when she said to a friend during her last illness: “The doctor says I may live till Christmas, but after that I must go away at once.”
Henry was not a sedulous correspondent: indulged by Michael, she only wrote letters when a rare mood prompted her to do so. But the fortunate friend who heard from her at those times received a missive that was like an emanation from her soul, tender, wise, penetrative, gravely witty and delicately sweet. One would like to give in full some of those letters, but must be content to quote characteristic fragments of them. Thus, in March of 1888, she wrote to Miss Alice Trusted:
I feel you will never let yourself believe how much you are loved by me.... Your letter is one of the most precious I have ever received. Ah! so a friend thinks of one; would that God could think with her! But it is a deep joy to me to be something to the souls that live along with me on the earth....
In May she wrote to the same friend an account of a visit to their “dear old friend, Mr Browning”:
He came in to us quite by himself, with one of his impetuous exclamations, followed by “Well, my two dear Greek women!” We found him well, lovingly kind, grave as ever. His new home is well-nigh a palace, and his famed old tapestries (one attributed to Giulio Romano) have now a princely setting.... He fell into a deep, mourning reverie after speaking of the death of Matthew Arnold, whom he called with familiar affection—;Mat. Then his face was like the surface of a grey pool in autumn, full of calm, blank intimité.
Another visit is described in July of the same year:
We have again been to see Mr Browning, and spent with him and his sister almost the only perfect hours of this season. Alice, he has promised me to play, the next time we meet, some of Galuppi’s toccatas!... He read to us some of the loveliest poems of Alfred de Musset, very quietly, with a low voice full of recueillement, and now and then a brief smile at some touch of exquisite playfulness. He is always the poet with us, and it seems impossible to realise that he goes behind a shell of worldly behaviour and commonplace talk when he faces society. Yet so it is: we once saw it was so. In his own home, in his study, he is “Rabbi ben Ezra,” with his inspired, calm, triumphant old age. His eyes rest on one with their strange, passive vision, traversed sometimes by an autumnal geniality, mellow and apart, which is beautiful to meet. Yet his motions are full of impetuosity and warmth, and contrast with his steady outlook and his ‘grave-kindly’ aspect.
One finds acute artistic and literary estimates in these letters. Thus, after an appreciation of Whistler’s nocturnes, she remarks of his Carlyle portrait, “It is a masterpiece; the face has caught the fervid chaos of his ideality.”
Of Onslow Ford’s memorial of Shelley she says: “The drowned nude ... is an excellent portrait of the model, and therefore unworthy of Shelley, to my mind. The conventional lions and the naturalistic apple-boughs don’t coalesce. The Muse is but a music-girl. I like the bold treatment of the sea-washed body.”
She sketches an illuminating comparison between the art of Pierre Loti’s Pêcheur d’lslande and that of Millet; and declares that Huysmans’ work “is the last word of decadence—;the foam on the most recent decay—;and yet there is something of meagre tragedy about it.”