Yes indeed, I say to myself, pen in hand, I can keep hold of the thread and let it lead me backto the first impression. The little story is all there, I can touch it from point to point; for thethread, as I call it, is a row of coloured beads on a string. None of the beads are missing-atleast I think they're not: that's exactly what I shall amuse myself with finding out.I had been all summer working hard in town and then had gone down to Folkestone for ablow. Art was long, I felt, and my holiday short; my mother was settled at Folkestone, and Ipaid her a visit when I could. I remember how on this occasion, after weeks in my stuffystudio with my nose on my palette, I sniffed up the clean salt air and cooled my eyes withthe purple sea. The place was full of lodgings, and the lodgings were at that season full ofpeople, people who had nothing to do but to stare at one another on the great flatdown. There were thousands of little chairs and almost as many little Jews; and there wasmusic in an open rotunda, over which the little Jews wagged their big noses. We all strolledto and fro and took pennyworths of rest; the long, level cliff-top, edged in places with itsiron rail, might have been the deck of a huge crowded ship. There were old folks in Bathchairs, and there was one dear chair, creeping to its last full stop, by the side of which Ialways walked. There was in fine weather the coast of France to look at, and there werethe usual things to say about it; there was also in every state of the atmosphere our friendMrs. Meldrum, a subject of remark not less inveterate. The widow of an officer in theEngineers, she had settled, like many members of the martial miscellany, well within sightof the hereditary enemy, who however had left her leisure to form in spite of the differenceof their years a close alliance with my mother. She was the heartiest, the keenest, theugliest of women, the least apologetic, the least morbid in her misfortune. She carried ithigh aloft with loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the breeze as if it had beenthe flag of her country. It consisted mainly of a big red face, indescribably out of drawing, from which she glared at you through gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic circles of suchdiameter and so frequently displaced that some one had vividly spoken of her as flatteringher nose against the glass of her spectacles. She was extraordinarily near-sighted, andwhatever they did to other objects they magnified immensely the kind eyes behindthem. Blest conveniences they were, in their hideous, honest strength-they showed thegood lady everything in the world but her own queerness. This element was enhanced bywild braveries of dress, reckless charges of colour and stubborn resistances of cut, wondrous encounters in which the art of the toilet seemed to lay down its life. She had thetread of a grenadier and the voice of an ange