Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 6.pdf/299

Rh more in her house than the tombstone rectitude of the chair-backs to remind me of the graveyard. I can still remember the sombre aisles of that house, the vault-like shadows, the magnificent window curtains that blotted out the windows. Life was too trivial for such things. She never knew she tired of them, but she did. That was the secret of her temper, I think; they engendered her sombre Calvinism, her perception of the trashy quality of human life. The pretence that they were the accessories to human life was too transparent. We were the accessories; we minded them for a little while, and then we passed away. They wore us out and cast us aside. We were the changing scenery; they were the actors who played on through the piece. It was even so with clothing. We buried my other maternal aunt—Aunt Adelaide—and wept, and partly forgot her, but her wonderful silk dresses—they would stand alone—still went rustling cheerfully about an ephemeral world.

All that offended my sense of proportion, my feeling of what is due to human life, even when I was a little boy. I want things of my own, things I can break without breaking my heart, and since one can live but once I want some change in my life; to have this kind of thing and then that. I never valued Aunt Charlotte's good old things until I sold them. They sold remarkably well, those chairs like nether millstones for the grinding away of men; the fragile china—an incessant anxiety until accident broke it and the spell of it at the same time; those silver spoons, by virtue of which Aunt Charlotte went in