“Mary, you are wonderful,” she would say.  “Honora’s clothes are better-looking than those I buy in the East, at such fabulous prices, from Cavendish.”

Indeed, no woman was ever farther removed from personal vanity than Aunt Mary.  She looked like a little Quakeress.  Her silvered hair was parted in the middle and had, in spite of palpable efforts towards tightness and repression, a perceptible ripple in it.  Grey was her only concession to colour, and her gowns and bonnets were of a primness which belonged to the past.  Repression, or perhaps compression, was her note, for the energy confined within her little body was a thing to have astounded scientists:  And Honora grew to womanhood and reflection before she had. guessed or considered that her aunt was possessed of intense emotions which had no outlet.  Her features were regular, her shy eye had the clearness of a forest pool.  She believed in predestination, which is to say that she was a fatalist; and while she steadfastly continued to regard this world as a place of sorrow and trials, she concerned herself very little about her participation in a future life.  Old Dr. Ewing, the rector of St. Anne’s, while conceding that no better or more charitable woman existed, found it so exceedingly difficult to talk to her, on the subject of religion that he had never tried it but once.

Such was Aunt Mary.  The true student of human nature should not find it surprising that she spoiled Honora and strove—­at what secret expense, care, and self-denial to Uncle Tom and herself, none will ever know—­to adorn the child that she might appear creditably among companions whose parents were more fortunate in this world’s goods; that she denied herself to educate Honora as these other children were educated.  Nor is it astonishing that she should not have understood the highly complex organism of the young lady we have chosen for our heroine, who was shaken, at the age of thirteen, by unfulfilled longings.

Very early in life Honora learned to dread the summer, when one by one the families of her friends departed until the city itself seemed a remote and distant place from what it had been in the spring and winter.  The great houses were closed and blinded, and in the evening the servants who had been left behind chattered on the front steps.  Honora could not bear the sound of the trains that drifted across the night, and the sight of the trunks piled in the Hanburys’ hall, in Wayland Square, always filled her with a sickening longing.  Would the day ever come when she, too, would depart for the bright places of the earth?  Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she was filled with a fierce belief in a destiny to sit in the high seats, to receive homage and dispense bounties, to discourse with great intellects, to know London and Paris and the marts and centres of the world as her father had.  To escape—­only to escape from the prison walls of a humdrum existence, and to soar!