"
But Mrs. Fisher's very abstractedness--and she seemed to be
absorbed chiefly in the interesting people she used to know and in
their memorial photographs, and quite a good part of the interview was
taken up by reminiscent anecdote of Carlyle, Meredith, Matthew Arnold,
Tennyson, and a host of others--her very abstractedness was a
recommendation. She only asked, she said, to be allowed to sit quiet
in the sun and remember. That was all Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins
asked of their sharers. It was their idea of a perfect sharer that she
should sit quiet in the sun and remember, rousing herself on Saturday
evenings sufficiently to pay her share. Mrs. Fisher was very fond,
too, she said, of flowers, and once when she was spending a week-end
with her father at Box Hill--
"Who lived at Box Hill?" interrupted Mrs. Wilkins, who hung on
Mrs. Fisher's reminiscences, intensely excited by meeting somebody who
had actually been familiar with all the really and truly and
undoubtedly great--actually seen them, heard them talking, touched
them.
Mrs. Fisher looked at her over the top of her glasses in some
surprise. Mrs. Wilkins, in her eagerness to tear the heart out quickly
of Mrs. Fisher's reminiscences, afraid that at any moment Mrs.
Arbuthnot would take her away and she wouldn't have heard half, had
already interrupted several times with questions which appeared
ignorant to Mrs.
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