'Havers.'

'Did you?'

'No.'

'Well, then, when you heard me at the gate?'

'It might have been when I heard you at the gate.'

As daylight goes she follows it with her sewing to the window, and
gets another needleful out of it, as one may run after a departed
visitor for a last word, but now the gas is lit, and no longer is
it shameful to sit down to literature. If the book be a story by
George Eliot or Mrs. Oliphant, her favourites (and mine) among
women novelists, or if it be a Carlyle, and we move softly, she
will read, entranced, for hours. Her delight in Carlyle was so
well known that various good people would send her books that
contained a page about him; she could place her finger on any
passage wanted in the biography as promptly as though she were
looking for some article in her own drawer, and given a date she
was often able to tell you what they were doing in Cheyne Row that
day. Carlyle, she decided, was not so much an ill man to live with
as one who needed a deal of managing, but when I asked if she
thought she could have managed him she only replied with a modest
smile that meant 'Oh no!' but had the face of 'Sal, I would have
liked to try.'

One lady lent her some scores of Carlyle letters that have never