It is a birthday treat to them already to take the key from
my split-ring, and look together over the half-forgotten things. But
there is one thing there--a manuscript on the topmost shelf--which they
do not know about, but which we take out and laugh over sometimes when
they are all in bed,--a record that I have kept of all the most
diverting things which we have heard them say, ever since they began to
learn to talk." She checked herself,--I fancied because she remembered
that, in her enthusiasm about the children, she had forgotten to what a
new acquaintance she was speaking. She rose to take leave, and resumed,
shaking hands with me cordially,--she had, I observed, a remarkably
cordial and pleasant, earnest way of shaking hands,--"But upon the
subject of my museum, Miss Morne, I need hardly beg you to be more
discreet than I, and not to mention a domestic trifle of so little
general interest."
I could only bow, but longed, as I attended her to the door, to assure
her of the particular interest which I had already begun to feel in
every trifle which belonged to her.
Her little barouche, and long-tailed, dark-gray ponies, vanished with
her down the road; and I was left walking up and down the room. The
"kind o' poor-lookin', pale-lookin', queer-lookin' lady," that Miss
Mehitable had described,--was this she? How are we ever to know people
by descriptions, when the same person produces one impression on one
mind and quite another on another,--nay, may have one set of inherent
qualities brought out by contact with one character, and quite another
set by contact with another character? Have _I_ described Miss Dudley?
No,--and I cannot.
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