te innocent, as we lay about in
that manner....

* * * * *

Our best friend was the artist's wife, Mrs. Rond ... she was, in her
way, herself a character ... the poverty of her family was extreme. She
had a numerous menage of daughters; and a horde of cats as pets.
Whenever she walked away from her house the cats followed her in a long
line, their tails gaily in the air, like little ships sailing.

Mrs. Rond smoked incessantly, rolling her own cigarettes, from packages
of Plowboy tobacco....

Her conversation was crisp, nervous, keen. An intellectual woman of the
highest type; with all her poverty, she preserved around her an
atmosphere of aristocratic fineness (even if she did smoke Plowboy)
which bespoke happier days, in an economic and social sense.

She was thoroughly radical, but quiet and unostentatious about it. She
looked on me and Hildreth as play-children of the feminist movement.

I think it was the exaggerated maternal instinct in her that moved her
to foster and champion Hildreth and me ... an instinct that made her
gather in every stray cat she found on the road ... she is the only
person I have ever known who could break through the reserve of the
cat's nature, and make it as fond and sentimental as a dog is toward its
master.

Mrs. Rond knew all the classics, and, in her library, which she never
let go, when their economic crash came, were most of the English poets
and essayists and novelists from Malory and Chaucer down to William
Watson and W.L. George....

She made us welcome at her home. We formed a pleasant group together,
the occupants of my little cottage back in the pines, and she, her
valitudinarian husband, and her four daughters, the eldest of whom,
Editha, was of an exquisite type of frail, fair beauty ... all her
daughters had inherited their mother's keen-mindedness ... she had
brought them up on the best in the thought, art, and literature of the
world....

The relationship between mother and daughters was one more of
delightful, understanding comradeship than anything else ... in spite of
the fact of Mrs. Rond's over-developed maternal instincts ... a
favourite trick of the two youngest daughters being to hide away
upstairs and then call out in mock tones of agony, in order to enjoy the
sight of their mother, running breathless, up from the kitchen or in
from the yard, and up the stairs, pale with premonition of some
accident or ill, and crying,