Her education being thus ordinary, her circumstances were no more out of
the common. She was an only child and had never been bullied and laughed
at by brothers and sisters. Her mother having died when she was eleven,
two aunts, the sisters of her father, brought her up, and they lived
for the sake of the air in a comfortable house in Richmond. She was
of course brought up with excessive care, which as a child was for her
health; as a girl and a young woman was for what it seems almost crude
to call her morals. Until quite lately she had been completely ignorant
that for women such things existed. She groped for knowledge in old
books, and found it in repulsive chunks, but she did not naturally care
for books and thus never troubled her head about the censorship which
was exercised first by her aunts, later by her father. Friends might
have told her things, but she had few of her own age,--Richmond being
an awkward place to reach,--and, as it happened, the only girl she knew
well was a religious zealot, who in the fervour of intimacy talked about
God, and the best ways of taking up one's cross, a topic only fitfully
interesting to one whose mind reached other stages at other times.
But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the other
grasping the knob on the arm, she was clearly following her thoughts
intently. Her education left her abundant time for thinking.
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