Publisher's Synopsis
I had been all summer working hard in town and then had gone down to Folkestone for a blow.Art was long, I felt, and my holiday short; my mother was settled at Folkestone, and I paid her a visitwhen I could. I remember how on this occasion, after weeks, in my stuffy studio, with my nose onmy palette, I sniffed up the clean salt air and cooled my eyes with the purple sea. The place was fullof lodgings, and the lodgings were at that season full of people, people who had nothing to do butto stare at one another on the great flat down. There were thousands of little chairs and almost asmany little Jews; and there was music in an open rotunda, over which the little Jews wagged their bignoses. We all strolled to and fro and took pennyworths of rest; the long, level cliff-top, edged inplaces with its iron rail, might have been the deck of a huge crowded ship. There were old folks inBath chairs, and there was one dear chair, creeping to its last full stop, by the side of which I alwayswalked. There was in fine weather the coast of France to look at, and there were the usual things tosay about it; there was also in every state of the atmosphere our friend Mrs. Meldrum, a subject ofremark 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 hereditary enemy, who however had lefther leisure to form in spite of the difference of their years a close alliance with my mother. She wasthe heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women, the least apologetic, the least morbid in hermisfortune. She carried it high aloft, with loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the breezeas if it had been the flag of her country. It consisted mainly of a big red face, indescribably out ofdrawing, from which she glared at you through gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic circles of suchdiameter and so frequently displaced that some one had vividly spoken of her as flattening her noseagainst the glass of her spectacles. She was extraordinarily near-sighted, and whatever they did toother objects they magnified immensely the kind eyes behind them. Blessed conveniences they were, in their hideous, honest strength-they showed the good lady everything in the world but her ownqueerness. This element was enhanced by wild braveries of dress, reckless charges of colour andstubborn resistances of cut, wonderous encounters in which the art of the toilet seemed to lay downits life. She had the tread of a grenadier and the voice of an angel