Soon after I began to attend the lectures, a French class was started in the old coach?house for certain young socialists who planned a tour in France, and I joi and was for a time a model student stantly enced by the pliments of the old French mistress. I told my father of the class, and he asked me to get my sisters admitted. I made difficulties and put off speaking of the matter, for I khat the new and admirable self I was making would turn, under family eyes, into plain rag doll. How could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry dramatization to the point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were there and khat I was nothing of the kind? But I had nument I could use and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so far as I remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinating idle self and had soohe class altogether. My elder sister stayed on and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris, and the hangings round Morriss big bed at Kelmscott House, Oxfordshire, with their verses about lying happily in bed when all birds sing iown of the tree, were from her needle though not from her design. She worked for the first few months at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination Iot always separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeed from the report of that tribe uild who looked up to Morris as to some worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for other people. I doubt if their marriage or death made him sad lad, a no man I have known was so well loved; you saw him produg everywhere anisation ay, seeming, almost in the same instant, helpless and triumphant; and people loved him as children are loved. People mu his neighbourhood became gradually occupied with him, or about his affairs, and without any wish on his part, as simple people bee occupied with children. I remember a man who roud and pleased because he had distracted Morris thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the versation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at Swinburne.
Oh, Swinburne, said Morris, is a rhetori; my masters have bees and Chaucer for they make pictures. Does not Milton make pictures? asked my informant. No, was the answer, Dante makes pictures, but Milton, though he had a great ear mind, expressed himself as a rhetori. Great ear mind,
sourao me and I doubt not that were his questioner not a simple man, Morris had been more violent. Another day the same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was worse and Morris cursed Chaucer for destroying the English language with fn words.
He had few detachable phrases and I remember little of his speech, which many thought the best of all good talk, except that it matched his burly body and seemed within definite boundaries inexhaustible in fad expression. He alone of all the men I have known seemed guided by some beast?like instind e strange meat. Balzac! Balzac! he said to me once, Oh, that was the man the French beoisie read so much a few years ago. I remember him at supper praising wine: Why do people say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the sunlight and the sap? and his dispraising houses decorated by himself: Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a house like a big barn, where oe in one er, cooked in another er, slept ihird er & in the fourth received ones friends; and his plaining of Ruskins obje to the underground railway: If you must have a railway the best thing you do with it i