"I was an uncomplaining, passionless child. In my cradle I received my first lessons in self-control. As I grew older, I learned another lesson, too unnatural for even a thoughtful child like me to understand. I was not needed here; I was considered only as a desirable ornament for this great house. I might as well have been placed upon a pinnacle and petrified at once, for all the childhood that was allowed to take root within me.
"My aunt's domestic misfortunes had embittered her, and she had no children to soften the natural austerity of her soul. My mother, who was her only sister, had, contrary to my aunt's wishes, married where her heart inclined. This was never forgiven or forgotten until she lay dead, and I was a wailing infant at her side.
"My father soon afterward perished at sea, and my aunt took me to her home.
"She was not designedly cruel; but she knew nothing of a child's requirements. The freezing system seemed to her the most effectual method of crushing out a young, impulsive nature. There was danger I might become rebellious, and hence she required the utmost meekness and submission.
"As soon as I came to understand the power of beauty, I saw that it was to mine I owed food and raiment; for it fed the exhaustless vanity of my aunt, with whom display was then, and still is, the moving spring of her existence.
"I was a drawing-room child, kept for exhibition at stated intervals. The tiny jewels on my neck and arms were hateful to me. My embroidered robe was a costly thing. I had given a young life for it.
"I had a mortal fear of losing my beauty. Our gardener's daughter—a comely, cheerful-looking girl, whom I was always glad to see, for she made the morning brighter with her fresh young face—had caught that loathsome disease, the small-pox. When she recovered, the change that had come upon her so terrified me, that I was seized with a sensation as of coming danger. I shrank from the girl, as if she would be the cause of some future misery to me.
"She had a mother to whom she seemed infinitely more dear now than she had ever been. But I, a lonely waif, what would become of me if I should be transformed like her?
"It was not altogether for my own gratification that I desired to retain this beauty. It was not my own beauty. It belonged to my aunt, and was all I had to give her in return for what she gave me.
"I was not a child that saw angels in the skies, or that expected manna to come down from heaven to feed me.