a misery to those about me. I ask no pity and, what is better still, no one ever offers me any. I make just as much hurry to be down in time for prayers as ever I did in my life; I still love that unlawful ten minutes in bed after being called, that has cost me so dear on many a terrible occasion; still, with a dexterity acquired by long practice, work at the rusty pump of daily conversation at the family table. I feel snubbed and miserable when the governor calls me by the time-honoured title of a dummy, and distinctly indignant when he apostrophizes me as a peacock, when my tail does not even touch the ground, and though I am growing as old as the hills, I have never yet relieved my feelings by making a good face at him to his face.
I can still see the absurd side of things as quickly as the sad, though for the matter of that the one frequently suggests the other. Now and then I feel a desperate distaste for my bright-coloured dresses and insouciant ways, and lean severely towards sackcloth and ashes, while as to lamentation I doubt not I could lift up my voice in a dolorous howl with the best. These luxuries being denied me, I am garbed like any other Christian, and my voice is seldom raised in anything more distracted than a bellow across country after one of the boys.
I wonder if I shall live to be an old woman? Perhaps, and take to flirting in my old age, like Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, and the rest. Until the other day I never knew that Antony's goddess was thirty years old when she fell in love with him; that Helen of Troy was forty when she eloped with Paris, sixty when she returned to her long-suffering husband. Madame Récamier was reckoned the most beautiful woman in Europe from the age of thirty-eight to fifty-three, Aspasia ruled royally from the age of thirty-six to that of sixty, and ever so many more of them; and to my thinking it is a miracle, with all these frisky matrons on record, that our mothers and grandmothers don't cast about their
