I Have Tried It Since Then With Every Sort Of
Accent And Inflection, But I Seem To Lack The Sense Of Humour.
They were of all ages:
Children at their first web of lace, a
stripling girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid
married women, and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and
some falling towards decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and
natural, ready to laugh and ready with a certain quiet solemnity
when that was called for by the subject of our talk. Life, since
the fall in wages, had begun to appear to them with a more serious
air. The stripling girl would sometimes laugh at me in a
provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge aright; and one
of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the party, gave me
many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy, or even my
arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous twinkle in
her eye that were eminently Scottish. But the rest used me with a
certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
human. Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible
gaiety of my native tongue. Between the old lady and myself I
think there was a real attachment. She was never weary of sitting
to me for her portrait, in her best cap and brigand hat, and with
all her wrinkles tidily composed, and though she never failed to
repudiate the result, she would always insist upon another trial.
It was as good as a play to see her sitting in judgment over the
last. 'No, no,' she would say, 'that is not it. I am old, to be
sure, but I am better-looking than that. We must try again.' When
I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in a
somewhat touching manner. We should not meet again, she said; it
was a long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is so full of
crooks, old lady, that who knows? I have said good-bye to people
for greater distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see
them yet again.
One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
oldest, and with hardly an exception. In spite of their piety,
they could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There
was nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human
body, but a woman of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of
it, fair and square, by way of conversational adornment. My
landlady, who was pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided
patois like a weakness, commonly addressed her child in the
language of a drunken bully. And of all the swearers that I ever
heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire.
I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet ended when I had
finished it and took my departure.
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