“You know the portraits of Francis I. Well, take that portrait as the basis of what you would call in your metaphysical jargon your ‘mental image’ of the manager’s face, soften down the nose a bit, and give him the rose-bloom colour of an English farmer, and there you have him.”
“What about Francis’s eyes?” I said.
“Well, they are not quite so small, but not big—blue-grey, but full of genius.”
And then I saw, coming towards us on a rough pony so diminutive that he well deserved the name of “Mouse,” the figure of a man in a wideawake—a figure so broad and square that the breeze at his back, soft and balmy as it was, seemed to be using him as a sail, and blowing both him and the pony towards us.
When Rossetti introduced me, the manager greeted him with a “H’m! I thought you were
alone.” This did not seem promising. Morris at that time was as proverbial for his exclusiveness as he afterwards became for his expansiveness.
Rossetti, however, was irresistible to everybody, and especially to Morris, who saw that he was expected to be agreeable to me, and most agreeable he was, though for at least an hour I could still see the shy look in the corner of his eyes. He invited me to join the fishing, which I did. Finding every faculty of Morris’s mind and every nerve in his body occupied with one subject, fishing, I (coached by Rossetti, who warned me not to talk about ‘The Defence of Guenevere’) talked about nothing but the bream, roach, dace, and gudgeon I used to catch as a boy in the Ouse, and the baits that used to tempt the victims to their doom. Not one word passed Morris’s lips, as far as I remember at this distance of time, which had not some relation to fish and baits. He had come from London for a few hours’ fishing, and all the other interests which as soon as he got back to Queen’s Square would be absorbing him were forgotten. Instead of watching my float, I could not help watching his face with an amused interest at its absorbed expression, which after a while he began to notice, and the following little dialogue ensued, which I remember as though it took place yesterday:—
“How old were you when you used to fish in the Ouse?”
“Oh, all sorts of ages; it was at all sorts of times, you know.”
“Well, how young then?”