Transcribed from the 1916 Martin Secker edition , emailccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Yes indeed, I say to myself, pen in hand, I can keep hold of thethread and let it lead me back to the first impression. The littlestory is all there, I can touch it from point to point; for the thread,as I call it, is a row of coloured beads on a string. None ofthe beads are missing—at least I think they’re not: that’sexactly what I shall amuse myself with finding out.
I had been all summer working hard in town and then had gone downto Folkestone for a blow. Art was long, I felt, and my holidayshort; my mother was settled at Folkestone, and I paid her a visit whenI could. I remember how on this occasion, after weeks in my stuffystudio with my nose on my palette, I sniffed up the clean salt air andcooled my eyes with the purple sea. The place was full of lodgings,and the lodgings were at that season full of people, people who hadnothing to do but to stare at one another on the great flat down. There were thousands of little chairs and almost as many little Jews;and there was music in an open rotunda, over which the little Jews waggedtheir big noses. We all strolled to and fro and took pennyworthsof rest; the long, level cliff-top, edged in places with its iron rail,might have been the deck of a huge crowded ship. There were oldfolks in Bath chairs, and there was one dear chair, creeping to itslast full stop, by the side of which I always walked. There wasin fine weather the coast of France to look at, and there were the usualthings to say about it; there was also in every state of the atmosphereour friend Mrs. Meldrum, a subject of remark not less inveterate. The widow of an officer in the Engineers, she had settled, like manymembers of the martial miscellany, well within sight of the hereditaryenemy, who however had left her leisure to form in spite of the differenceof their years a close alliance with my mother. She was the heartiest,the keenest, the ugliest of women, the least apologetic, the least morbidin her misfortune. She carried it high aloft with loud soundsand free gestures, made it flutter in the breeze as if it had been theflag of her country. It consisted mainly of a big red face, indescribablyout of drawing, from which she glared at you through gold-rimmed aidsto vision, optic circles of such diameter and so frequently displacedthat some one had vividly spoken of her as flattering her nose againstthe glass of her spectacles. She was extraordinarily near-sighted,and whatever they did to other objects they magnified immensely thekind eyes behind them. Blest conveniences they were, in theirhideous, honest strength—they showed the good lady everythingin the world but her own queerness. This element was enhancedby wild braveries of dress, reckless charges of colour and stubbornresistances of cut, wondrous encounters in which the art of the toiletseemed to lay down its life. She had the tread of a grenadierand the voice of an angel.
In the course of a walk with her the day after my arrival I foundmyself grabbing her arm with sudden and undue familiarity. I hadbeen struck by the beauty of a face that approached us and I was stillmore affected when I saw the face, at the sight of my companion, openlike a window thrown wide. A smile fluttered out of it an brightlyas a drapery dropped from a sill—a drapery shaken there in thesun by a young lady flanked by two young men, a wonderful young ladywho, as we drew nearer, rushed up to Mrs. Meldrum with arms flourishedfor an embrace. My immediate impression of her had been that shewas dressed in mourning, but during the few moments she stood talkingwith our friend I made more discoveries. The figure from the neckdown was meagre, the stature insignificant, but the desire t