To those who do not read between the lines, "So-so" sounds (as he felt) "very soft and pleasant," but to me the tale is in Julie's saddest strain, because of the suspicion of hopelessness that pervades it;--a spirit which I do not trace in any of her other writings.
"Be sure, my child," said the widow to her little daughter, "that you always do just as you are told."
"Or at any rate do what will do just as well," said the small house-dog, as he lay blinking at the fire.
"For the future, my child," said the widow, "I hope you will always do just as you are told, whatever So-so may say."
"I will, mother," said little Joan. (And she did.) But the house-dog sat and blinked. He dared not speak, he was in disgrace.
"I do not feel quite sure about So-so. Wild dogs often amend their ways far on this side of the gallows, and the Faithful sometimes fall, but when any one begins by being only so-so, he is very apt to be so-so to the end. So-so's so seldom change."
Before turning from the record of my sister's life at Manchester, I must mention a circumstance which gave her very great pleasure there. In the summer of 1875 she and I went up from Aldershot to see the Exhibition of Water-Colours by the Royal Society of Painters, and she was completely fascinated by a picture of Mr. J.D. Watson's, called "A Gentleman of the Road." It represented a horseman at daybreak, allowing his horse to drink from a stream, whilst he sat half-turned in the saddle to look back at a gallows which was visible on the horizon against the beams of rising light. The subject may sound very sensational, but it was not that aspect of it which charmed my sister; she found beauty as well as romance in it, and after we returned to camp in the evening she became so restless and engrossed by what she had seen, that she got up during the night, and planned out the headings of a story on the picture, adding--characteristically--a moral or "soul" to the subject by a quotation[31] from Thomas à Kempis--_Respice finem_. "In all things _remember the end_."
This "mapped-out" story, I am sorry to say, remains unfinished. The manuscript went through many vicissitudes, was inadvertently torn up and thrown into the waste-paper basket, whence it was rescued and the pieces carefully enclosed in an envelope ready for mending. It was afterwards lost again for many months in a box that was sent abroad, but the fragments have been put together and copied, as they are interesting from the promise that lies in the few words that remain.