Chapter 1

Yes indeed, I say to myself, pen in hand, I can keep hold of the
thread and let it lead me back to the first impression. The little
story is all there, I can touch it from point to point; for the
thread, as I call it, is a row of coloured beads on a string. None
of the beads are missing--at least I think they're not: that's
exactly what I shall amuse myself with finding out.

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 visit
when I could. I remember how on this occasion, after weeks in my
stuffy studio with my nose on my palette, I sniffed up the clean
salt air and cooled my eyes with the purple sea. The place was
full of lodgings, and the lodgings were at that season full of
people, people who had nothing to do but to stare at one another on
the great flat down. There were thousands of little chairs and
almost as many little Jews; and there was music in an open rotunda,
over which the little Jews wagged their big noses. We all strolled
to and fro and took pennyworths of rest; the long, level cliff-top,
edged in places with its iron rail, might have been the deck of a
huge crowded ship. There were old folks in Bath chairs, and there
was one dear chair, creeping to its last full stop, by the side of
which I always walked. There was in fine weather the coast of
France to look at, and there were the usual things to say about it;
there was also in every state of the atmosphere our friend Mrs.
Meldrum, a subject of remark not less inveterate. The widow of an
officer in the Engineers, she had settled, like many members of the
martial miscellany, well within sight of the hereditary enemy, who
however had left her leisure to form in spite of the difference of
their years a close alliance with my mother. She was the
heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women, the least apologetic,
the least morbid in her misfortune. She carried it high aloft with
loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the breeze as if
it had been the flag of her country. It consisted mainly of a big
red face, indescribably out of drawing, from which she glared at
you through gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic circles of such
diameter and so frequently displaced that some one had vividly
spoken of her as flattering her nose against the glass of her
spectacles. She was extraordinarily near-sighted, and whatever
they did to other objects they magnified immensely the kind eyes
behind them. Blest conveniences they were, in their hideous,
honest strength--they showed the good lady everything in the world
but her own queerness. This element was enhanced by wild braveries
of dress,