Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/427

18 I feel her kindness very specially and am bound not to meet it with a long face."

With a long face he did not meet it, whatever his private troubles and perplexities might be. "According to my recollection," Mr. William De Morgan says of these voyages, "we none of us stopped laughing all the way. The things that come out prominent in my recollection of the two journeys, just as they come, are:1. Morris sitting cooking the dinner inside the house-boat with the window closed to keep the wind off the spirit lamp, and ourselves outside looking at him through the glass.2. The party sitting in a circle at dinner on the riverbank, and Morris starting straight off with an Icelandic or other story which kept us all quiet and well-behaved till washing-up time.3. Detection and conviction by Morris of the Thames Conservancy, which he was always catching at some new misdemeanour.4. A battle royal at Henley at the hotel where we put up, about whether Mrs. Harris was or was not an abstraction. It began like this: we played Twenty Questions, and Mrs. Harris was the subject to be guessed—I think by me, as I was sent out of the room while the discussion proceeded how my first question, 'abstract or concrete?' should be answered. I remember being outside the door when the waiter came up from the people in the room underneath to know if anything was the matter. It was a warm discussion; virtually between Charles Faulkner and Morris. Faulkner maintained that Mrs. Harris was just as much a concrete idea as any other character in fiction. Morris repudiated this indignantly, affirming that she wasn't even a character in fiction, as she doesn't occur in the story except as an invention of Mrs. Gamp, who is herself a character in fiction. It is a delicate question: I recollect discussing it after-