Personal Pleasures Read Free Page A

time? Always? Dear me. Yes, I see, this is his
hacienda
in the Argentine, with himself and Miss Jones, grown nice and plump, in the porch. … Oh, not Miss Jones? She stayed in England, with the children? Then this would be some other lady, more of the Argentine type. … I expect your uncle Frank was wise to settle there, among cattle; as your Aunt Elizabeth was wise to settle among chickens. Animals are a great resource. And so much nicer to rear them than to go and shoot them.
    Photographs of ancestors are really much more interesting than the paintings of them they had before, because the camera cannot lie, so we know that they really did look like that. Now-a-days they touch them up more; the camera has learnt to lie. Besides, do we look as interesting? I am sure we do not. I could look at our ancestors for ever. Thank you so much for showing me yours. It has been a charming evening. You must come and see mine.
    A charming evening. But as I drive home, the small cold wind of mortality hums round me with sighing breath. The way to dusty death seems to stretch before me, lit by those fading yellow oblongs wherefrom someone’s ancestors gaze, pale pasteboard prisoners, to be wondered about, recalled, lightly summed and dismissedby us as we turn a page. So too shall we gaze out some autumn evening, prisoned and defenceless, to stir in posterity a passing idle speculation, a moment’s memory. That? Oh, that is great-aunt Rose. … She wrote. Oh, nothing you would have heard of; I don’t think she was ever much read, even at the time; she just wrote. Novels, essays, verse—I forget what else; she just wrote away, as those Georgians did. Rather dull, I think. What besides? Well, I think she just went about; nothing special. There
was
some story … but it’s all so long ago, I’ve forgotten. She ended poor, having outlived whatever market she had, poor old thing. Yes, she went on writing, but no one read her … she died poor, killed, I think, in an aeroplane smash; she learnt to pilot too old; she should have stuck to motoring. But she would learn to fly, and finally smashed a friend’s plane and herself … silly, really. She had grown very tiresome before the end, they say. But look, here is someone more interesting. …
    It will be posterity’s charming evening then, and theirs to pity, if they will, their pasteboard prisoners, as I now pity Aunt Geraldine with her mermaid’s face and form, Uncle Frank who had to leave home so suddenly and so frequently, Great-Aunt Helen, of the rogue’s face and little feather, who fell at the water-jump sixty years ago, Grandpapa General, who rode back with the Light Brigade, Grandmama, who had to be so often locking and unlocking her stores, Aunt Elizabeth with her forceps and her chickens, Aunt Amy rippling so elegantly from the waist down andmarrying the curate who wrote tracts about the Eastward Position.…
    Poor figures I feel we shall most of us cut beside them, when the Albums shall imprison us too.

Arm-Chair
    I love it, I love it, and who shall dare
    To chide me for loving that old arm-chair?
    So, A century ago, defiantly enquired Miss Eliza Cook. Already, obviously, the sour and scornful denigrators of this article of furniture were busy with their cheap sneers, which one can only surmise to be based on envy. If Miss Cook’s question were answered, one would find that the sneerers at the arm-chair (and they are many, in these days) were men who do not possess such chairs. They may be smart, modern men, whose chairs have arms of steel. They may be poor men; who cannot, perhaps, afford arm-chairs; who, having purchased one, possibly, on the Pay-Way system (“we never mention money here, Mr. Everyman”), found it reft from them at the last owing to their too close adherence to this policy of reticent silence. They find themselves arm-chairless; they have to sit up straight on armless chairs, an embittering