ings, would fain cast its guiding reins
into the hands of circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel. Of
course, since my aunt's strength, which was completely drained by the
slightest exertion, returned but drop by drop into the pool of her
repose, the reservoir was very slow in filling, and months would go by
before she reached that surplus which other people use up in their daily
activities, but which she had no idea--and could never decide how to
employ. And I have no doubt that then--just as a desire to have her
potatoes served with bechamel sauce, for a change, would be formed,
ultimately, from the pleasure she found in the daily reappearance of
those mashed potatoes of which she was never 'tired'--she would extract
from the accumulation of those monotonous days (on which she so much
depended) a keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm, instantaneous
in its happening, but violent enough to compel her to put into effect,
once for all, one of those changes which she knew would be beneficial to
her health, but to which she could never make up her mind without some
such stimulus. She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed the
long luxury of weeping for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when
she felt 'well' and was not in a perspiration, the news that the house
was being destroyed by a fire, in which all the rest of us had already
perished, a fire which, in a little while, would not leave one stone
standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have
plenty of time to escape without undue haste, provided that she rose
at once from her bed, must often have haunted her dreams, as a prospect
which combined with the two minor advantages of letting her taste the
full savour of her affection for us in long years of mourning, and of
causing universal stupefaction in the village when she should sally
forth to conduct our obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but
erect, the paramount and priceless boon of forcing her at the right
moment, with no time to be lost, no room for weakening hesitations, to
go off and spend the summer at her charming farm of Mirougrain, where
there was a waterfall. Inasmuch as nothing of this sort had ever
occurred, though indeed she must often have pondered the success of
such a manoeuvre as she lay alone absorbed in her interminable games of
patience (and though it must have plunged her in despair from the first
moment of its realisation, from the first of tho