Free Short Stories 1927-1956 by Walter de la Mare

her chair, her shoulders squared above her fortified bosom, her knees close together over her square-toed shoes, her whole frame encased in a primrose-coloured afternoon gown – its only adornments a cameo brooch on a small black bow, a thin gold chain about her neck, and a cluster of sapphires on her wedding-ring finger – while she steadily continued to hold his eyes.
    ‘It is very kind indeed of you,’ began Ronnie. ‘I was afraid that a visit like this from a complete stranger, and without any warning or introduction, could not but seem in the nature of an intrusion. To be quite candid, Mrs Cotton, I was afraid that if I wrote to you first, asking for the privilege of such an opportunity, I might be – well, misunderstood.’
    ‘That,’ was the reply, ‘would all depend on what you actually said in your letter.’
    ‘Yes,’ retorted Ronnie warmly. ‘But then you know what letters are. Besides , as a matter of fact I have come, not on my own behalf – though, in a sense, that very much too, for I am, of course, deeply interested – but on behalf of a friend of mine, a young American, now at the University of Ohio. He is most anxious to —’
    But Mrs Cotton had suavely interrupted him. ‘Almost exactly nine years have gone by, Mr Forbes, since I have heard of anyone being interested enough in my son’s writings to come all the way from London, as I see you have – let alone America – to tell me so. I receive letters now and then, but very few. But although, as I say, nine years have gone by, that particular occasion is still quite fresh in my mind. Your friend may not perhaps have seen an article which appeared about that time in the Modern Literature Review ?’
    ‘That was the very reason —’ began Ronnie, but Mrs Cotton had once more intervened, almost as if she were anxious to save him even from the most candid of white lies.
    ‘It is a relief to me that you have seen the – the article. I wonder if you would be very much surprised, Mr Forbes, or whether perhaps you will think me ungracious, if I say that I didn’t entirely approve of it. What are your feelings?’
    The light-coloured eyes under the square brows never swerved by a hair’s-breadth , while Ronnie at last managed to get in his reply.
    ‘You mean, of course,’ he said, ‘Cyril Charlton? Well, quite candidly, Mrs Cotton, and I can say it without the faintest vestige of disloyalty, for I haven’t the pleasure of knowing Mr Charlton, I thought his paper was amateurish and superficial. He is a critic of sorts, of course; and I have no doubt he – he meant well. But, how shall I say it? – the whole thing was so fumbling and uncertain. He didn’t seem to —’
    ‘In some respects,’ Mrs Cotton interjected, rounding her eye at him as inquiringly as might a robin perched on a sexton’s shovel, ‘in some respects hardly “ uncertain ”,surely?’
    ‘Oh, you mean in the facts,’ said Ronnie.
    ‘I mean in the facts,’ said Mrs Cotton. ‘I am not suggesting that Mr Charlton was anything but perfectly polite and, ifone may say so, plausible, though I use the word in no damaging sense, of course. He knew my son’s poems, I won’t say by heart, but certainly by rote. He sat where you sit now and quoted them to me. Stanza after stanza, as if they had just been dug up out of the grave, as I understand Mr Rossetti’s were. As if I had never read a line of them myself. He was, he assured me, profoundly interested in literature, “profoundly”. He was astonished, seemed genuinely astonished, at the thought that so few lovers of poetry – his own words – had even so much as heard of my son’s books. A fair, rather silly-looking young man; with a cheek like a girl’s. I couldn’t have conceived such fluency possible. He talked and talked. That, of course, was exceedingly nice of him and, so far as it went, reassuring. But, believe me, Mr Forbes, he almost took my breath away. I said to myself, here is a young man whose