Chapter 8.

When I entered the room I found Miss Halcombe and an elderly lady seated at the luncheon

table.

The elderly lady, when I was presented to her, proved to be Miss Fairly's former governess,

Mrs. Vessie, who had been briefly described to me by my lively companion at the breakfast

table, as possessed of all the cardinal virtues and counting for nothing.

I can do little more than offer my humble testimony to the truthfulness of Miss Halcombe's sketch

of the old lady's character.

Mrs. Vessie looked the personification of human composure and female amoeuability, a

calm enjoyment of a calm existence beamed in drowsy smiles on her plump, placid face.

Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life.

Mrs. Vessie sat through life.

Sat in the house early in late, sat in the garden, sat in unexpected window-seats and passages,

sat on a camp stool when her friends tried to take her out walking.

Sat before she looked at anything, before she talked of anything, before she answered,

yes, or no, to the commonest question, always, with the same serene smile on her lips,

the same vacantly attentive turn of the head, the same snuffling,

snugly comfortable position of her hands and arms under every possible change of domestic

circumstances.

A mild, a compliant, and unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any

chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth.

Nature has so much to do in this world, and has engaged in generating such a vast variety

...