Let me put down what I was like at this moment of leaving the old life.
I was of average height, but slight build: a frail inconspicuous figure, with small limbs, neatly made perhaps, if too thin for shapeliness. I looked so young for my age that when only a day or two before my departure I first put my hair up, there was a ridiculous contrast between the adult austere bun—Victorian fashion, at the back, lumpy, far-protruding—and the fifteen-year-old face. Or so I thought, laughing into the mirror. My appearance was one of the few things I was not vain of—not yet—or I should have wept rather than laughed: ugly straight rebellious hair; eyes between green and grey-green, weak and often sore; a short pointed and unpleasant nose. On the other hand, a shapely well-cut mouth, and my mother's delicate complexion. When not tearful and sulky, my habitual expression was one of Quakerish meekness and demureness, wholly natural and wholly unconscious: at any rate now, and until the Serpent showed me that in this quakerishness lay a species of attraction.
On the whole I kept a silent tongue in my head; was voluble only before an audience: Lord Tawborough, or the girls at school whom I regaled with Aunt Jael, or (most important) myself, my oldest audience. My manners were of a piece with my appearance: meek, nervous, old-fashioned, though very "grown-up," in odd contrast with my appearance. Here also I discovered later there lurked an asset, an attracting quality.
Perhaps I was clever. It was a woman's cleverness, sureness not of intellect but of intuition, coupled with an uncanny judgment in matters where my own emotions were at stake or in the motives and actions of others. No. 8 Bear Lawn and No. 1 The Quay were my forcing-beds. I was incapable of connected thought as opposed to connected emotion, and I had no haziest notion of science or logic or business affairs. My two possessions were an imagination so vivid that I saw, at once, physically and with a perfect clearness of outline, whatever I thought of, and a memory so retentive, alike for facts and faces, that I can fairly describe it as one of the two or three best I have ever known.
There was a good deal of knowledge in my head: a lob-sided mass. What I knew, if usual for my age, was much less remarkable than what I did not know. My three special acquirements were: first, an intimate acquaintance with the Word of God that is hardly conceivable today and was rare even fifty years ago. Second, excellent French: the new life would give me the practice to make perfect. Third, the knowledge of history I had picked up in my French reading. Novels, romances, poetry, were all forbidden; except therefore for Huguenot works, devotional and doctrinal, with which Miss le Mesurier had bravely persevered, we were forced to fall back exclusively on history.
I re-produced the drama of history on a gigantic stage, as wide as Time, and cast myself for all the leading rôles. Here again the old handicap of sex enraged me: even though it was all make-believe, yet for me, a woman, to live again the deeds of men, was but make-believe. Almost all the best parts had been taken by men; women were slaves, nobodies; unwanted, oppressed; man's victim—or audience. I delighted all the more to read of those few women who, at moments throughout the centuries, had held the stage: Joan of Arc, Isabella of Castile, Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth Farnese. I took a pleasure no man could understand in reflecting that among the monarchs of England, no less than five were queens-regnant. The most extreme delight lay in the deeds of tyrant women. When I read of Queen Cleopatra or Empress Catherine lording it over their subjects—men—dealing out sensual cruelties and senseless barbarities to men—riding roughshod over the pride and power of men—I exulted, breathed hard for joy. It was an instinct stronger than will, some atavistic legacy; against my own tastes, too, for in my experience—wide in imagination if pitifully narrow in fact—I liked men better than women; against my religion also. This I discovered at the Misses Primps', when we were doing English history. I found that the great Marian burnings of the Protestants, with whom alike as Plymouth Sister and human being I sympathized, gave me at one and the same time a feeling of evil exaltation, inasmuch as it was a woman, albeit Bloody Mary, who had the power to send hundreds of men to the stake. In the great Malagasy persecution of my own day, my burning sympathy with the Christian martyrs hurled over the vulture-haunted rock of Ambohipotsy was stifled by a brutal lilting pleasure that the persecutor was a queen, a woman. Cleopatra, Catherine, Mary Tudor, Ranavalona, all these, however bad and cruel, had striven to redress the balance of wrong which was at all times weighted against their sex and mine.
The Bible, Brethren Theology, French, some history; that was the sum-total of what I knew. What I did not know was much more remarkable. Nothing of art, fiction, poetry, romance; never a word of Shakespeare, Scott, Milton; nothing of contemporary books or events or persons; not even the names of Palmerston, Bright, Disraeli, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson. I did just know that the Duke of Wellington was dead, that a war somehow concerned with negro slaves was raging across the Atlantic, and that a new Napoleon reigned in France. I had never been to any form of lecture, concert, or entertainment, nor into any normal household of healthy young people. Fireside games, the ordinary interests of girlhood, the hundred happinesses of family life were all unknown. I had never seen a newspaper, touched a pack of cards, nor smelt tobacco.
My character was what these twenty-three chapters should have displayed. If it had not shown the steady development of a normal life, still less of a novelist's creation, it was because my circumstances and surroundings did not change or enlarge in ordinarily gradual fashion. My life was a stringing-together of certain special events and outstanding memories—Beetle, Benamuckee, fear that the world would end, knowledge of how life began, the terrible epoch of Torribridge, Baptism, Brandy—each of which had brought suddenly a new series of emotions. Fundamentally I changed little. At eighteen I was as at eight, only "more so"; my hates and hopes were vivider. On the whole I was less unhappy than in my early childhood. The reason was that I had come to visualize and daydream more in the future than in the past; to hope more than to regret. But always I was lonely.
The experience of divine companionship had not made me want human love less. Self-absorbed to mania, I yet wanted nothing so much as to merge my individuality and dissolve my self in a loved being. Loving myself, my supreme hope was some one I could love more. The some one was ordained unalterably, and day and night alike my thoughts were of Robbie—my Robbie; i. e., the real Robbie up to seven years ago, and a creation of my own fashioning since. On Christmas Nights, I had him about as near and as physical as ever, though never near nor real enough for my need, never the comfort of flesh and blood and of perfect spiritual contact for which I hungered and waited. I feared the waiting might be long. Instinct left no doubt that one day we should meet, and mate, and marry; but forbade that I should try to force the event or seek to discover where he might be or how I might come upon him. Temptation overcame me during one rare visit of Aunt Martha's; she knew, however, nothing. Yet why need I worry? As sure as heaven or hell he would come to me. I had earned love; for all my long unhappy motherless young life Robbie was my requital. So much did I believe also in the complementary doctrine of an Envious Power that I was half-frightened at the success and pleasure the new life abroad seemed to promise. Surely I should have to pay for it, perhaps by losing Robbie. God gets even.