Your grandfather had in him much of the stuff of a Hebrew prophet; something of the amazing vigour of his youth remained to him, but he no longer spent his strength in climbing mountains or coaching crews; all his devotion for many years had concentrated itself upon his home. And now that against all his expectations, his wife had died before him, he was like one who, by the failure of some stay, reels staggering blindly about the world, and fills it with his woe. But no words of mine can convey what he felt, or even the energy of the visible expression of it, which took place in one scene after another all through that dreadful summer. One room it seemed was always shut, was always disturbed now and then, by some groan or outburst. He had constant interviews with sympathetic women, who went in to see him nervously enough, and came out flushed and tear-stained, confused as people are who have been swept away on the tide of someone else’s emotion, to give their report to Stella. Indeed all her diplomacy was needed to keep him occupied in some way, when his morning’s work was over; and there were dreadful meal-times when, unable to hear what we said, or disdaining its comfort, he gave himself up to the passion which seemed to burn within him, and groaned aloud or protested again and again his wish to die. I do not think that Stella lost consciousness for a single moment during all those months of his immediate need. She would always have some little device to offer him, observing him so closely that she would suddenly beg one of us to speak to him directly, or ask him to walk with us. Sometimes at night she spent a long time alone in his study with him, hearing again and again the bitter story of his loneliness, his love and his remorse. For exhausted and unstrung as he was he came to torment himself piteously with the idea that he had never told his wife how much he had loved her, that she had endured anxiety and suffering by his side in silence.

“I was not as bad as Carlyle, was I?”fn1 I have heard him ask. Stella perhaps knew little of Carlyle, but her assurance came over and over again, tired but persistent. There is, no doubt, a strange comfort in making the living hear your confession of wrong done to the dead; not only can they reassure you from their own observation, but they also represent, mysteriously, a power which can be appeased by your confession, and can grant you something approaching a final absolution. For these reasons, then, and also because it was his nature and habit to find ease in the expression of his feelings, he did not scruple to lay before her his sufferings and to demand perpetual attention, and whatever comfort she had to give. But what comfort could she give? From the nature of the case there was little to be done; all depended therefore upon what she was, for suddenly she was placed in the utmost intimacy with a man who as her stepfather and an elderly man of letters she had hitherto regarded only with respect and a formal affection. Stella’s position, until this crisis, had been in some ways peculiar; indeed her character altogether, as one sees it now illuminated afresh by one’s own equality of age, was remarkable; remarkable for what it was, and for its destiny; great issues hung upon her life; but the shortness and almost tremulous quality of the early years make it hard to tell the story with any decision.

She was not clever, she seldom read a book; and this fact had I think an immense influence upon her life, a disproportionate influence, indeed. She exaggerated her own deficiency, and, living in close companionship with her mother, was always contrasting their differences, and imputing to herself an inferiority which led her from the first to live in her mother’s shade. Your grandmother too was, I have said, ruthless in her ways, and quite indifferent, if she saw good, to any amount of personal suffering. It was characteristic of her to feel that her daughter was, as she expressed it, part of herself, and as a slower and less efficient part she did not scruple to treat her with the severity with which she would have treated her own failings, or to offer her up as freely as she would have offered herself. Once before your grandparents’ marriage, when your grandfather remarked to her upon the harshness with which she treated Stella in comparison with the other children who were both boys, she gave the answer I have written.fn2

As a child then, Stella was suppressed, and learned early to look upon her mother as a person of divine power and divine intelligence. But later as Stella grew older and developed her own beauty, her own singular charm and temperament, her mother ceased her harshness, if it were ever rightly called so, and showed only the true cause of it, a peculiar depth and intimacy of feeling. They always kept in the main the relationship which nature perhaps had ordained. Stella was always the beautiful attendant handmaid, feeding her mother’s vivid flame, rejoicing in the service, and making it the central duty of her life. But besides this she began very soon to enjoy the influence of her gifts on others; she was beautiful, more beautiful than her pictures show, for much of her phantom loveliness came from accidents of the moment – the pale luminous complexion, the changing light in the eyes, the movement and ripple of the whole. If your grandmother’s was a head of the finest period of Greek art, Stella’s was Greek too, but it was Greek of a later and more decadent age, making with its softer lines and more languid shape, a closer appeal. But in each case, their beauty was the expression of them. Stella was mutable, modest, but somehow with what is called charm or magic possessed of wonderful distinction, and the power of penetrating deeply into people’s minds. It was not I suppose for what she said, for that was simple enough; but for her ripple of sweetness and laughter over a shape, dimly discerned, as of statuesque marble. She was so gay, so feminine, and at the same time had about her something of the large repose which in her mother, under stress of circumstance, had resolved itself into an enduring melancholy. Stella and her coming out, and her success and her lovers, excited many instincts long dormant in her mother; she liked young men, she enjoyed their confidences, she was intensely amused by the play and intrigue of the thing; only, as she complained, Stella would insist upon going home, long before the night was over, for fear lest she should be tired. That indeed was what, with desperate use of imagery, I have called her marble shape; for all her triumphs were mere frippery on the surface of this constant preoccupation with her mother.