'And then,' I might point out, 'he would roar to her to shut the
door.'

'Pooh!' said my mother, 'a man's roar is neither here nor there.'
But her verdict as a whole was, 'I would rather have been his
mother than his wife.'

So we have got her into her chair with the Carlyles, and all is
well. Furthermore, 'to mak siccar,' my father has taken the
opposite side of the fireplace and is deep in the latest five
columns of Gladstone, who is his Carlyle. He is to see that she
does not slip away fired by a conviction, which suddenly overrides
her pages, that the kitchen is going to rack and ruin for want of
her, and she is to recall him to himself should he put his foot in
the fire and keep it there, forgetful of all save his hero's
eloquence. (We were a family who needed a deal of watching.) She
is not interested in what Mr. Gladstone has to say; indeed she
could never be brought to look upon politics as of serious concern
for grown folk (a class in which she scarcely included man), and
she gratefully gave up reading 'leaders' the day I ceased to write
them. But like want of reasonableness, a love for having the last
word, want of humour and the like, politics were in her opinion a
mannish attribute to be tolerated, and Gladstone was the name of
the something which makes all our sex such queer characters. She
had a profound faith in him as an aid to conversation, and if there
were silent men in the company would give him to them to talk
about, precisely as she divided a cake among children. And then,
with a motherly smile, she would leave them to gorge on him. But
in the idolising of Gladstone she recognised, nevertheless, a