"The only reminder of him in the
house now is a big copy of the presentation portrait that stands on the
stairs of the Multitechnic Institute at Peckham--you know--that
life-size one with his fat hand sprinkled with rings resting on a thick
Bible and the other slipped between the buttons of a tight frock-coat.
It hangs in the dining room and rather dominates our meals. I wish Mabel
would take it down. I think she'd like to, if she dared. There's not a
single photograph of him anywhere, even in her own room. Mrs. Marsh is
here--you remember her, his housekeeper, the wife of the man who got
penal servitude for killing a baby or something--you said she robbed him
and justified her stealing because the story of the unjust steward was
in the Bible! How we laughed over that! She's just the same too, gliding
about all over the house and turning up when least expected."
Other reminiscences filled the next two sides of the letter, and ran,
without a trace of punctuation, into instructions about a Salamander
stove for heating my work-room in the flat; these were followed by
things I was to tell the cook, and by requests for several articles she
had forgotten and would like sent after her, two of them blouses, with
descriptions so lengthy and contradictory that I sighed as I read them--
"unless you come down soon, in which case perhaps you wouldn't mind
bringing them; not the mauve one I wear in the evening sometimes, but
the pale blue one with lace round the collar and the crinkly front.
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