Chapter 11

Soon after I began to attend the lectures, a French class was
started in the old coach-house for certain young socialists who
planned a tour in France, and I joined it and was for a time a
model student constantly encouraged by the compliments of the old
French mistress. I told my father of the class, and he asked me to
get my sisters admitted. I made difficulties and put off speaking
of the matter, for I knew that the new and admirable self I was
making would turn, under family eyes, into plain rag doll. How
could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry dramatization to
the point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were there and
knew that I was nothing of the kind? But I had no argument I could
use and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so far
as I can remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinating
idle self and had soon left the class altogether. My elder sister
stayed on and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris,
and the hangings round Morris's big bed at Kelmscott House,
Oxfordshire, with their verses about lying happily in bed when
'all birds sing in the town of the tree,' were from her needle
though not from her design. She worked for the first few months
at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination I cannot
always separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeed
from the report of that tribe or guild who looked up to Morris
as to some worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for other
people. I doubt if their marriage or death made him sad or glad,
and yet no man I have known was so well loved; you saw him
producing everywhere organisation and beauty, seeming, almost in
the same instant, helpless and triumphant; and people loved him as
children are loved. People much in his neighbourhood became
gradually occupied with him, or about his affairs, and without any
wish on his part, as simple people become occupied with children.
I remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had
distracted Morris' thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the
conversation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at
Swinburne. 'Oh, Swinburne,' said Morris, 'is a rhetorician; my
masters have been Keats and Chaucer for they make pictures.' 'Does
not Milton make pictures?' asked my informant. 'No,' was the
answer, 'Dante makes pictures, but Milton, though he had a great
earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician.' 'Great earnest
mind,' sounded strange to me and I doubt not that were his
questioner not a simple man, Morris had been more violent. Another
day the same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was

worse and Morris cursed Chaucer for destroying the English
language with foreign words.

He had few