was brought in. Miss Pinshon took the magazine out of my hand.
"She has a good voice, but she wants expression," was her remark.
"I could not understand what she was reading," said my Aunt Gary.
"Nor anybody else," said Preston. "How are you going to give expression, when there is nothing to express?"
"That is where you feel the difference between a good reader and one who is not trained," said my governess. "I presume Daisy has never been trained."
"No, not in anything," said my aunt. "I dare say she wants a good deal of it."
"We will try," said Miss Pinshon.
It all comes back to me as I write, that beginning of my Magnolia life. I remember how dazed and disheartened I sat at the tea-table, yet letting nobody see it; how Preston made violent efforts to change the character of the evening; and did keep up a stir that at another time would have amused me. And when I was dismissed to bed, Preston came after me to the upper gallery and almost broke up my power of keeping quiet. He gathered me in his arms, kissed me and lamented me, and denounced ferocious threats against "Medusa;" while I in vain tried to stop him. He would not be sent away, till he had come into my room and seen that the fire was burning and the room warm, and Margaret ready for me.
With Margaret there was also an old coloured woman, dark and wrinkled, my faithful old friend Mammy Theresa! but indeed I could scarcely see her just then, for my eyes were full of big tears when Preston left me; and I had to stand still before
the fire for some minutes before I could fight down the fresh tears that were welling up and let those which veiled my eyesight scatter away. I was conscious how silently the two women waited upon me. I had a sense even then of the sympathy they were giving. I knew they served me with a respect which would have done for an Eastern princess; but I said nothing hardly, nor they, that night.