“Stop! Stop! I cannot endure it!”
Money troubles of hero or heroine especially afflicted her; this was odd, for she bore the loss of the greater part of her own fortune with courage and equanimity. Though she knew the value of money, and practised the most touching little economies so that she might have more to give away, she cared very little about money and was always too busy with more important matters to think much of it. The stories of arctic adventure, Jack London’s especially, “gave her the shivers;” she ached with the cold and hunger of his dogs and heroes. The younger people among the listeners often envied her enthusiasm. Her imagination was so keen, her power of making believe the story was real so tantalizing, infectious too, that it carried us through many a book that would have been dull without it.
One of the last books she enjoyed was Dr. Morton Prince’s Dissociation of a Personality. She was deeply interested in this last word on psychology and every day at luncheon gave us an account of Sally’s last prank.
In her later years, though she wrote much poetry, she did not read as much English verse as in her youth. I do not know at what period she studied Shakespeare, but she was so familiar with the plays that at the theatre I have often heard her murmur a correction of a line falsely given by some player. Her memory was prodigious; it was like a vast collection of pigeon-holes, where there was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. She seemed to have a sort of mental card-catalogue of all the knowledge that was stored away in her capacious brain. It was as if the subjects were all classified, and when she wished to speak, write or think on any given one, she consulted the catalogue, then went straight to the alcove in that well stored library and brought forth volume after volume dealing with the subject under consideration. It will hardly be believed that she wrote her volume of Reminiscences entirely from memory, never so much as consulting her own diary. It has been said of her that she remembered all she ever knew, whereas most of us forget a large part of what we have known. She certainly had an unusual command of her own knowledge. On one of my long absences in Europe, I had taken with me by mistake her large Worcester’s dictionary, thinking it was mine. On my return after an absence of more than two years, I exclaimed:
“How dreadful it was of me to take your dictionary—what have you done—did you buy a new one?”
“I did not know you had taken it,” she said.
“But—how did you get along without a dictionary?”
She was surprised at the question.
“I never use a word whose meaning I do not know.”
“But the spelling?”