human
How heavy the scent of those lilacs is,
gpt
Yes; that brings back to me a story that I've been thinking of telling you. I think I will tell you now, Grisel, he said.
human
Something that happened in my youth. My father was a parson, and there were six of us children. My mother died when I was about eight, and an old aunt of ours, my father's sister, came and lived with us and brought us up. She was a good woman, absolutely without imagination, and she looked rather like Miss Breeze. When I think of my Aunt Susan I always see her behind a kind of barricade of baskets full of mending of all kinds. She spent the greater part of her life with a boy's stocking drawn up over her left arm and a needle full of wool in her right hand. She did her best by us, poor woman, but she bored us, every one, and I suppose she could not have been very wise about our health, because before I left home four of us had died, two--the twins, who had never been very strong--of pneumonia, and the other two of diphtheria. It is not very interesting, but it explains just a little the way I felt that day----
gpt
I was just twenty-one, he went on, smiling at her,
human
I know--the one who died in New Zealand.
gpt
Yes. Well, one day Celia and I went up to Coops Hall, our nearest neighbours, some people named Fenwick, to plan tennis. It was a day like yesterday, very sunny and hot, and it must have been about this time of the year, because the white lilacs--a great clump of them of which Mrs. Fenwick was very proud--were in full bloom, and the air thick with their scent.
human
I remember perfectly well how I felt as we came up the incline of the lawn to the tulip trees where two or three hammocks were slung and where the Fenwick girls and their brother were sitting. That is one of the moments in my life of which I can still always recapture the very _feel_. After a moment he went on.
gpt
She was standing, leaning on a croquet mallet, with her sideface towards me. Her left profile, which was always better than the right--and still is for that matter----
human
But, John! the girl cried in amazement,
gpt
I am, my dear. The only love story I ever had until I met you.
human
She wore a blue and white striped dress, as it used to be called in those days, bunched up at the back over a bustle, and, oh dear me, how her hair shone in the sun! It was rather a saintly face, he went on after a moment,
gpt
No, John. You know I don't like poetry much.