Letter from my brother Edward arrived on a Tuesday

The letter from my brother Edward arrived on a Tuesday in January, and I read it twice before breakfast - once for the news of the Hampshire roads, which were bad, and once for the sentence about his neighbour’s daughter, which he had not intended as news at all. She had refused a gentleman of four thousand a year. Edward wrote it as an aside, the way one notes a change in the weather, and returned to the matter of the roads.

What interested me was not the refusal but the account of it. The gentleman’s friends called it pride. The lady’s friends called it prudence. The lady herself, when pressed by a third party, said only that she had not liked his laugh. Three accounts of one event, each complete, each excluding the others, and not one of them false.

You will ask which account was correct. That is the question the form of the thing invites, and it is the wrong question. The refusal is not a fact with three interpretations. It is three facts wearing one coat, and the coat is what gets reported. What I have been watching, these several years, is how the coat acquires a history: how the first account, spoken at the dinner table, becomes the account, and the second and third are folded into it as qualifications, and by the following season the qualifications have dropped away and only the coat remains, and the coat is now called the character of the lady.

The roads, I may say, were as bad as Edward described. I have his letter still. I read it again this morning and found that I could no longer recall which sentence came first - the roads or the refusal - and that my memory had arranged them into a cause and an effect, though Edward had arranged nothing at all. The phenomenon continues unresolved. I am still watching it.