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A memory to bring a lump into a grandchild’s throat, the picture of stern old Gran’papa, with his whole edifice of dignity built up so solidly, from his square-toed boots and speckless broadcloth and his grey satin tie with its pearl pin, to his curly beard and cold blue eyes, and the unnecessary skull-cap upon his splendid white head, fantastically topped by a scolding bull-canary. A grown-up Laura, looking back, a long way back, might begin, belatedly, to miss a half-forgotten Gran’papa, might wonder whether, after all, she had sufficiently appreciated him, realize with a sigh that she had learned in those young years to love him as sincerely and coldly and faithfully as he had loved her; though ‘love’ was not a word that Laura could imagine Gran’papa using, any more than she could hear him saying, ‘pretty girl’ when he meant, he emphatically meant, ‘an elegant young female.’ Even ‘young woman’ would have been a concession for Gran’papa’s nice ear. Just so, Laura’s phrase would have been tempered by Gran’papa to ‘affection,’ ‘esteem,’ ‘respect.’ And there she would have agreed with him again, for she certainly respected him profoundly. And he, secretly, respected her, because in her he could recognize his own keen, fastidious spirit. Emotionally, they were at opposite poles, but intellectually they were allies with kindred tastes and kindred minds. Not kindred souls—there they parted company; for where Laura’s affection could invariably be trusted to blind her to the most obvious flaws, the testing tool of her grandfather’s hypercritical taste had left him, at the end of a long life, with no object worth loving at all—save Laura. That Laura, his flesh and blood, had something of his own grey matter in her head too, was a secret delight to him: and by the time he was eighty and she eighteen, Laura had discovered that secret and how, in consequence, to wind him, for all his tetchiness, round her finger. But that is at yet eight or nine years ahead, and Laura only beginning to discover that in Gran’papa’s room, at Gran’papa’s lowest bookshelf, she could sometimes forget to wonder if Mother would come this afternoon.