She kept herself marvellously alive to all the changes that went on around her, as though she heard perpetually the ticking of a vast clock and could never forget that some day it would cease for all of us. People of the most diverse kinds came to her when they had reason to rejoice or to weep; she seemed, if anything, a little indiscriminate in her choice of friends; but bores and fools have their moments. And it must be owned that living thus at high pressure she contrived to invest the whole scene with an inimitable bravery as though she saw it properly composed, of fools, clowns and splendid Queens, a vast procession on the march towards death. This intense preoccupation with the event of the moment arose partly no doubt because nature had fitted her to deal victoriously with such matters; but also because she had inborn in her and [had] acquired a deep sense of the futility of all effort, the mystery of life. You may see the two things in her face. ‘Let us make the most of what we have, since we know nothing of the future’ was the motive that urged her to toil so incessantly on behalf of happiness, right doing, love; and the melancholy echoes answered ‘What does it matter? Perhaps there is no future.’ Encompassed as she was by this solemn doubt her most trivial activities had something of grandeur about them; and her presence was large and austere, bringing with it not only joy and life, exquisite fleeting femininities, but the majesty of a nobly composed human being.

Written words of a person who is dead or still alive tend most unfortunately to drape themselves in smooth folds annulling all evidence of life. You will not find in what I say, or again in those sincere but conventional phrases in the life of your grandfather, or in the noble lamentations with which he fills the pages of his autobiography,fn10 any semblance of a woman whom you can love. It has often occurred to me to regret that no one ever wrote down her sayings and vivid ways of speech since she had the gift of turning words in a manner peculiar to her, rubbing her hands swiftly, or raising them in gesticulation as she spoke.fn11 I can see her, standing by the open door of a railway carriage which was taking Stella and some others to Cambridge, and striking out in a phrase or two pictures of all the people who came past her along the platform, and so she kept them laughing till the train went.

What would one not give to recapture a single phrase even! or the tone of the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and so distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, a little upwards, so that the eye looked straight out at you. “Come children,” she would say directly she had waved her last fantastic farewell, and one would grasp her umbrella, and another her arm, and one no doubt would stand gaping, and she would call sharply, “Quick, quick”. And so she would pass with her swift step, through the crowds, and into some dingy train or omnibus, where perhaps she would ask the conductor why the company did not give him straw to stand on – “Your feet must be cold” – and hear his story and make her comment, until we were home just in time for lunch. “Don’t keep father waiting.” And at lunch in answer to some languid question, “So those young people are gone? We . . .11,1 don’t envy ’em”, she would have her little story to tell, or perhaps her cryptic phrase which we could not interpret, but knew from the shrugs and “Perhaps” that it bore on one of those romances which they both loved to discuss. The relationship between your grandfather and mother was, as the saying is, perfect, nor would I for a moment dispute that, believing as I do that each of these much tried and by no means easy-going people found in the other the highest and most perfect harmony which their natures could respond to. Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances of pure and unutterable delight in each other. But, if I can convey my meaning by the metaphor, the high consonance, the flute voices of two birds in tune, was only reached by rich, rapid scales of discord, and incongruity. After all she was fifteen years the younger, and his age was made emphatic by the keen intellect, always voyaging, as she must have thought, alone in ice-bound seas. Her pride in it was like the pride of one in some lofty mountain peak, visited only by the light of the stars, and the rain of snow; it was enthusiastic, but very humble.

She delighted to transact all those trifling businesses which, as women feel instinctively, are somehow derogatory to the dignity which they like to discover in clever men; and she took it as proud testimony that he came to her ignorant of all depressions and elations but those that high philosophy bred in him. But she never belittled her own works, thinking them, if properly discharged, of equal, though other, importance with her husband’s. Thus in those moments, breathing spaces in the incessant conflict, when each rested secure for a second in the other’s embrace, she knew with just but always delighted pride, that he worshipped in her something as unchallengeably high as the lofty remote peak which she honoured in him. And each sprang rejoicing to do homage to qualities unlike their own – how sweet, released from the agony and loneliness of thought to recognize instantly the real presence of unquestionable human loveliness! as a seafarer wrapt for many days in mist on the fruitless waters lands at dawn upon a sunlit shore, where all nature enfolds him and breathes in his ear rest and assurance. She too whose days were spent in labours often trifling, and often vain, exulted as one clasped suddenly in strong arms and set above it all, silent, still and immortal. She was always the first to reinforce his own impulse towards the most remote and unprofitable tasks; it was on her assurance I think that he began his last long book, The Utilitarians fn12 which would yield no wealth and very little fame, for she undertook that all other matters would prosper meanwhile.

But these are the pinnacles of life, and as time drew on, the struggle grew sharper, and the buoyancy of youth diminished. His health was worn, and the kind of praise which would have encouraged him, delayed unduly, as he complained. And by this time she had expanded so far, into such remote recesses, alleys in St Ives, London slums, and many other more prosperous but no less exacting quarters, that retrenchment was beyond her power. Every day brought her, it seemed, a fresh sprung harvest that must be despatched and would flourish infallibly tomorrow. Each evening she sat at her table, after some laborious afternoon, her hand moving ceaselessly, at the last a little erratically, as she wrote answers, advice, jests, warning, sympathy, her wise brow and deep eyes presiding, so beautiful still, but now so worn, so profoundly experienced that you could hardly call them sad. When she was dead I found a desk shut when we left St Ives with all the letters received that morning freshly laid in it, to be answered perhaps when she got to London. There was a letter from a woman whose daughter had been betrayed and asked for help; a letter from George, from Aunt Mary,fn13 from a nurse who was out of work, some bills, some begging letters, and many sheets from a girl who had quarrelled with her parents and must reveal her soul, earnestly, diffusely. “Ah, thank Heaven, there is no post tonight!” she would exclaim, half smiling and half sighing, on Saturday; and even your grandfather would look up from his book, press her hand, and vainly protest, “there must be an end of this, Julia!”

In addition to all her other labours she took it on herself to teach us our lessons, and thus established a very close and rather trying relationship, for she was of a quick temper, and least of all inclined to spare her children.