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"It's in London," said Mrs Arbuthnot
"Is it?" said Lady Caroline
It all seemed most restful
Mrs Fisher was unable to come to the club because, she explained by letter, she could not ithout a stick; therefore Mrs Arbuthnot and Mrs Wilkins went to her
"But if she can't coo to Italy?" wondered Mrs Wilkins, aloud
"We shall hear that from her own lips," said Mrs Arbuthnot
From Mrs Fisher's lips theyin trains was not walking about; and they knew that already Except for the stick, however, she appeared to be a most desirable fourth--quiet, educated, elderly She was much older than they or Lady Caroline--Lady Caroline had inforht--but not so old as to have ceased to be active-minded She was very respectable indeed, and still wore a coh her husband had died, she told theraphs of illustrious Victorian dead, all of whom she said she had knohen she was little Her father had been an eminent critic, and in his house she had seen practically everybody as anybody in letters and art Carlyle had scowled at her; Matthew Arnold had held her on his knee; Tennyson had sonorously rallied her on the length of her pig-tail She ani everywhere on her walls, pointing out the signatures with her stick, and she neither gave any information about her own husband nor asked for any about the husbands of her visitors; which was the greatest comfort Indeed, she see who the fourth lady was to be, and being told it was a Lady Caroline Dester, she said, "Is she atoo?" And on their explaining that she was not, because she had not yet been ood time"
But Mrs Fisher's very abstractedness--and she see people she used to know and in their ood part of the intervieas taken up by reminiscent anecdote of Carlyle, Meredith, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and a host of others--her very abstractedness was a recommendation She only asked, she said, to be allowed to sit quiet in the sun and remember That was all Mrs Arbuthnot and Mrs Wilkins asked of their sharers It was their idea of a perfect sharer that she should sit quiet in the sun and res sufficiently to pay her share Mrs Fisher was very fond, too, she said, of flowers, and once when she was spending a week-end with her father at Box Hill-"Who lived at Box Hill?" interrupted Mrs Wilkins, who hung on Mrs Fisher's re somebody who had actually been fareat--actually seen the, touched them