No, what she meant was that I looked so young, and - and that would take him aback, for had I not written as an aged man?
'But he knows my age, mother.'
'I'm glad of that, but maybe he wouldna like you when he saw you.'
'Oh, it is my manner, then!'
'I dinna say that, but - '
Here my sister would break in: 'The short and the long of it is just this, she thinks nobody has such manners as herself. Can you deny it, you vain woman?' My mother would deny it vigorously.
'You stand there,' my sister would say with affected scorn, 'and tell me you don't think you could get the better of that man quicker than any of us?'
'Sal, I'm thinking I could manage him,' says my mother, with a chuckle.
'How would you set about it?'
Then my mother would begin to laugh. 'I would find out first if he had a family, and then I would say they were the finest family in London.'
'Yes, that is just what you would do, you cunning woman! But if he has no family?'
'I would say what great men editors are!'
'He would see through you.'
'Not he!'
'You don't understand that what imposes on common folk would never hoodwink an editor.'
'That's where you are wrong. Gentle or simple, stupid or clever, the men are all alike in the hands of a woman that flatters them.'
'Ah, I'm sure there are better ways of getting round an editor than that.'
'I daresay there are,' my mother would say with conviction, 'but if you try that plan you will never need to try another.'
'How artful you are, mother - you with your soft face! Do you not think shame?'
'Pooh!' says my mother brazenly.
'I can see the reason why you are so popular with men.'
'Ay, you can see it, but they never will.'
'Well, how would you dress yourself if you were going to that editor's office?'
'Of course I would wear my silk and my Sabbath bonnet.'
'It is you who are shortsighted now, mother. I tell you, you would manage him better if you just put on your old grey shawl and one of your bonny white mutches, and went in half smiling and half timid and said, "I am the mother of him that writes about the Auld Lichts, and I want you to promise that he will never have to sleep in the open air."'
But my mother would shake her head at this, and reply almost hotly, 'I tell you if I ever go into that man's office, I go in silk.'
I wrote and asked the editor if I should come to London, and he said No, so I went, laden with charges from my mother to walk in the middle of the street (they jump out on you as you are turning a corner), never to venture forth after sunset, and always to lock up everything (I who could never lock up anything, except my heart in company). Thanks to this editor, for the others would have nothing to say to me though I battered on all their doors, she was soon able to sleep at nights without the dread that I should be waking presently with the iron-work of certain seats figured on my person, and what relieved her very much was that I had begun to write as if Auld Lichts were not the only people I knew of. So long as I confined myself to them she had a haunting fear that, even though the editor remained blind to his best interests, something would one day go crack within me (as the mainspring of a watch breaks) and my pen refuse to write for evermore. 'Ay, I like the article brawly,' she would say timidly, 'but I'm doubting it's the last - I always have a sort of terror the new one may be the last,' and if many days elapsed before the arrival of another article her face would say mournfully, 'The blow has fallen - he can think of nothing more to write about.' If I ever shared her fears I never told her so, and the articles that were not Scotch grew in number until there were hundreds of them, all carefully preserved by her: they were the only thing in the house that, having served one purpose, she did not convert into something else, yet they could give her uneasy moments. This was because I nearly always assumed a character when I wrote; I must be a country squire, or an undergraduate, or a butler, or a member of the House of Lords, or a dowager, or a lady called Sweet Seventeen, or an engineer in India, else was my pen clogged, and though this gave my mother certain fearful joys, causing her to laugh unexpectedly (so far as my articles were concerned she nearly always laughed in the wrong place), it also scared her.