Her letters are supposed to be unusually well written, and I believe it is said among the family that Charlotte has far more real literary power than Ernest has. Sometimes we think that she is writing at him as much as to say, “There now—don’t you think you are the only one of us who can write; read this! And if you want a telling bit of descriptive writing for your next book, you can make what use of it you like.” I daresay she writes very well, but she has fallen under the dominion of the words “hope,” “think,” “feel,” “try,” “bright,” and “little,” and can hardly write a page without introducing all these words and some of them more than once. All this has the effect of making her style monotonous.
Ernest is as fond of music as ever, perhaps more so, and of late years has added musical composition to the other irons in his fire. He finds it still a little difficult, and is in constant trouble through getting into the key of C sharp after beginning in the key of C and being unable to get back again.
“Getting into the key of C sharp,” he said, “is like an unprotected female travelling on the Metropolitan Railway, and finding herself at Shepherd’s Bush, without quite knowing where she wants to go to. How is she ever to get safe back to Clapham Junction? And Clapham Junction won’t quite do either, for Clapham Junction is like the diminished seventh—susceptible of such enharmonic change, that you can resolve it into all the possible termini of music.”
Talking of music reminds me of a little passage that took place between Ernest and Miss Skinner, Dr Skinner’s eldest daughter, not so very long ago. Dr Skinner had long left Roughborough, and had become Dean of a Cathedral in one of our Midland counties—a position which exactly suited him. Finding himself once in the neighbourhood Ernest called, for old acquaintance sake, and was hospitably entertained at lunch.
Thirty years had whitened the Doctor’s bushy eyebrows—his hair they could not whiten. I believe that but for that wig he would have been made a bishop.
His voice and manner were unchanged, and when Ernest remarking upon a plan of Rome which hung in the hall, spoke inadvertently of the Quirinal, he replied with all his wonted pomp: “Yes, the QuirInal—or as I myself prefer to call it, the QuirInal.” After this triumph he inhaled a long breath through the corners of his mouth, and flung it back again into the face of Heaven, as in his finest form during his head-mastership. At lunch he did indeed once say, “next to impossible to think of anything else,” but he immediately corrected himself and substituted the words, “next to impossible to entertain irrelevant ideas,” after which he seemed to feel a good deal more comfortable. Ernest saw the familiar volumes of Dr Skinner’s works upon the bookshelves in the Deanery dining-room, but he saw no copy of “Rome or the Bible—Which?”
“And are you still as fond of music as ever, Mr Pontifex?” said Miss Skinner to Ernest during the course of lunch.
“Of some kinds of music, yes, Miss Skinner, but you know I never did like modern music.”
“Isn’t that rather dreadful?—Don’t you think you rather”—she was going to have added, “ought to?” but she left it unsaid, feeling doubtless that she had sufficiently conveyed her meaning.
“I would like modern music, if I could; I have been trying all my life to like it, but I succeed less and less the older I grow.”