“A fat, bald, deaf old woman,” continues she, not heeding me, and speaking with slow emphasis, while she raises one trembling hand to mark each unpleasant adjective; “if in the year ’2 any one had told me that I should have lived to be that, I think I should have killed them or myself! and yet now I am all three.”
“You are not very deaf,” say I politely—(the fatness and baldness admit of no civilities consistent with veracity)—but I raise my voice to pay the compliment.
“In the year ’2 I was seventeen,” she says, wandering off into memory. “Yes, my dear, I am just fifteen years older than the century and it is getting into its dotage, is not it? The year ’2—ah! I that was just about the time that I first saw my poor Bobby! Poor pretty Bobby.”
“And who was Bobby?” ask I, pricking up my ears, and scenting, with the keen nose of youth, a dead-love idyll; an idyll of which this poor old hill of unsteady flesh was the heroine.
“I must have told you the tale a hundred times, have not I?” she asks, turning her old dim eyes towards me. “A curious tale, say what you will, and explain it how you will. I think I must have told you; but indeed I forgot to whom I tell my old stories and to whom I do not. Well, my love, you must promise to stop me if you have heard it before, but to me, you know, these old things are so much clearer than the things of yesterday.”
“You never told me, Mrs. Hamilton,” I say, and say truthfully; for being a new acquaintance I really have not been made acquainted with Bobby’s history. “Would you mind telling it me now, if you are sure that it would not bore you?”
“Bobby,” she repeats softly to herself, “Bobby. I daresay you do not think it a very pretty name?”
“N—not particularly,” reply I honestly. “To tell you the truth, it rather reminds me of a policeman.”
“I daresay,” she answers quietly; “and yet in the year ’2 I grew to think it the handsomest, dearest name on earth. Well, if you like, I will begin at the beginning and tell you how that came about.”
“Do,” say I, drawing a stocking out of my pocket, and thriftily beginning to knit to assist me in the process of listening.