justice to say that she declared her opinion in favour of it then she looked at me through the eye glass again wouldn t you like to go to school i shook my head no why not i went to school when i was a girl of your age yes but i shouldn t like to go to school thank you mother couldn t do without me for one thing she gave a short sort of laugh oh little miss you set yourself at a high value she remarked how do you think my mother did without me i don t know i don t think about it but i m sure mine couldn t could you mother i am not going to try said my mother quietly if she was an invalid my mother was not weak minded and in spite of mrs and one or two other friends who offered advice the magic wheel upon the subject i passed my at and i never went to school so many people then said that it would be better for me if i did that i grew up with a certain amount of doubt upon the subject but looking back over the long years which have passed between then and now i feel sure that my mother was right that had i gone to school i should never have been built up into even the semblance of strength which is now mine i have no recollection of ever having been spoiled i was never punished in my life i never remember being naughty � at least if i was i was unconsciously naughty for nobody ever told me of it but i do not think i was ever a child in the common of the word i lived the same life as my parents i had the same meals that they had i got up when they got up and i went to bed when i wished to go to bed not before i could ride and drive and fish and shoot i knew everything about country life � i mean about animals and things of that kind � and i had an appetite for any sort of reading i read the newspapers and the weekly journals as regularly as my first sign of father and mother did i read every magazine and novel that came into the house and when occasionally they failed i fell back upon shakespeare and the poets from the time i was twelve years until i was turned seventeen the dog cart used to go to the station every morning to fetch a lady who was my she was not a french woman as mrs had recommended but she taught and spoke both french and german exceedingly well and in both these languages she me otherwise i grew up without any of the ordinary accomplishments i never tried to draw anything in my life i could not play a note on the piano i never sang excepting when i went to church and plain was utterly beyond my ken by the time i was eighteen years old and had finished my education i had only been two or three times in london with the exception of single nights when we had broken our journey from where my mother went every year to take the waters consequently i had no passion for a career on the stage i never longed to be on the business side of the al the magic wheel though i in the theatre when i was able to go to it as perhaps no girl ever did before was in fact an creature for i had no and i was perfectly content and happy in my country home i never even thought about the husband that would one day be mine true it never occurred to me that by any possibility i should remain unmarried my mother always spoke of my marriage as a something which would certainly happen just as she might have spoken of my death i had read so many novels that i knew he would come from somewhere and so i never worried about him i never came out in society i had always been out and when i had reached my birthday i had never been to a low dance in my life in fact i never learned to dance at all until one summer at when i had assumed the dignity of long and had turned my hair up i never had a dancing lesson i took up the accomplishment as something to do i suppose if i had lived in london i should have gone in for skirt dancing but at such a thing had never been i first sign of heard of at that time of day and my dancing over which my german mistress had so and of which she had predicted such great issues remained like a rose in the wilderness wasting its sweetness on the desert air then something happened to me i was passing through the hall one day on my way from the garden to pour out my mother s tea i came in by the front door which was shaded by a curious glass porch at all times kept filled with plants in summer it was always in greater beauty than in winter for and blue hung from the roof within the hall which was a large square entrance very much of the nature of a sitting room many other plants were set exactly opposite to the door was an enormous looking glass in a massive gilt frame this stretched from the ceiling to the floor a group of palms and other green plants stood at one side of this glass and its other corner was shaded by a curtain of beads up to one side as i advanced to the glass on my way to the drawing room door i saw a strange young man walking immediately 