Ideala | Page 4

most part--men especially so."
That way she had of forgetting people's presence was one of her
peculiarities. If she liked you she was content just to have you there,
but she never showed it except by a regretful glance when you went
away. She was very absent, too. One day I found her with a big,

awkward volume on her knee, heated, excited, and evidently put out.
"Is anything the matter?" I wanted to know.
"O yes," she answered desperately; "I've lost my pen, and I'm writing
for the mail."
"Why, where are you looking for it?" I asked.
She glanced at me, and then at the book.
"I--I believe," she faltered, "I was looking for it among the p's in the
French dictionary."
On another occasion I watched her revising a manuscript. As she wrote
her emendations she gummed them on over the old copy, and she was
so absorbed that at last she put the gum-brush into the ink-bottle.
Discovering her mistake, she gave a little disconcerted sort of laugh,
and took the brush away to wash it. She returned presently, examining
it critically to see if it were perfectly cleansed, and having satisfied
herself, she carefully put it back in the ink-bottle.
But perhaps the funniest instance of this peculiarity of hers was one
that happened in the Grosvenor Gallery on a certain occasion. She had
been busy with her catalogue, doing the pictures conscientiously, and
not talking at all, when suddenly she burst out laughing.
"Do you know what I have been doing?" she said. "I wanted to know
who that man is"--indicating a gentleman of peculiar appearance in the
crowd--"and I have been looking all over him for his number, that I
might hunt up his name in the catalogue!"
Her way of seeing analogies as plausible as the obvious relation of p to
pen, and of acting on wholly wrong conclusions deduced from most
unexceptionable premises, was another characteristic. She always
blamed her early education, or rather want of education, for it. "If I had
been taught to think," she said, "when my memory was being burdened
with historical anecdotes torn from the text, and other useless scraps of

knowledge, I should be able to see both sides of a subject, and judge
rationally, now. As it is, I never see more than one side at a time, and
when I have mastered that, I feel like the old judge in some Greek play,
who, when he had heard one party to a suit, begged that the other
would not speak as it would only poggle what was then clear to him."
But in this Ideala was not quite fair to herself.
It was not always--although, unfortunately, it was oftenest at critical
moments--that she was beset with this inability to see more than one
side of a subject at a time. The odd thing about it was that one never
knew which side, the pathetic or the humorous, would strike her.
Generally, however, it was the one that related least to herself
personally. This self-forgetfulness, with a keen sense of the ludicrous,
led her sometimes, when she had anything amusing to relate, to
overlook considerations which would have kept other people silent.
"I saw a pair of horses running away with a heavy wagon the other
day," she told us once. "It was in Cross Street, and there was a child in
the way--there always is a child in the way!--and, as there was no one
else to do it, I ran into the road to remove that child. I had to pull it
aside quickly, and there was no time to say 'Allow me'--in fact, there
was no time for anything--and in my hurry I lost my balance and fell in
the mud, and the wagon came tearing over me. It was an unpleasant
sensation, but I wasn't hurt, you know; neither the wheels nor the
horses touched me. I got very dirty, though, and I have no doubt I
looked as ridiculous as I felt, and for that I expected to be tenderly dealt
with; but when I went to ask after the child, a few days later, a
neighbour told me that its mother was out, and it was a good thing too,
as she had been heard to declare she would 'go for that lady the next
time she saw her, for flingin' of her bairn about!'"
When she had told the story, Ideala was horrified to find that the fact,
which she had overlooked, of her having risked her life to save the
child struck us all much more forcibly than the ingratitude that amused
her.
Although her sense of humour was keen, it was not always, as I said

before, the humorous side of a subject that struck her. I found