's exactly what I shall amuse
myself with finding out.

GLASSES

I

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 flattening 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. Blessed 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, reckless charges o