use, she explained
by letter, she could not walk without a stick; therefore Mrs. Arbuthnot
and Mrs. Wilkins went to her.

"But if she can't come to the club how can she go to Italy?"
wondered Mrs. Wilkins, aloud.

"We shall hear that from her own lips," said Mrs. Arbuthnot.

From Mrs. Fisher's lips they merely heard, in reply to delicate
questioning, that sitting in trains was not walking about; and they
knew that already. Except for the stick, however, she appeared to be a
most desirable fourth--quiet, educated, elderly. She was much older
than they or Lady Caroline--Lady Caroline had informed them she was
twenty-eight--but not so old as to have ceased to be active-minded.
She was very respectable indeed, and still wore a complete suit of
black though her husband had died, she told them, eleven years before.
Her house was full of signed photographs of illustrious Victorian dead,
all of whom she said she had known when she was little. Her father had
been an eminent critic, and in his house she had seen practically
everybody who was anybody in letters and art. Carlyle had scowled at
her; Matthew Arnold had held her on his knee; Tennyson had sonorously
rallied her on the length of her pig-tail. She animatedly showed them
the photographs, hung everywhere on her walls, pointing out the
signatures with her stick, and she neither gave any information about
her own husband nor asked for any about the husbands of her visitors;
which was the greatest comfort. Indeed, she seemed to think that they
also were widows, for on inquiring who the fourth lady was to be, and
being told it was a Lady Caroline Dester, she said, "Is she a widow
too?" And on their explaining that she was not, because she had not
yet been married, observed with abstracted amiability, "All in good
time."

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. M