Temple Bailey
An Autobiography
ALTHOUGH my ancestry is all of New England, I was born in the old town of Petersburg, Virginia. I went later to Richmond, and finally at the age of five to Washington, D. C., returning to Richmond for a few years in a girls' school, which was picturesquely quartered in General Lee's mansion, now the home of the Virginia Historical Association.
I think it was, perhaps, because of my life in cities that I learned in early years to appreciate the romance of them, the picturesqueness, the charm. It was, indeed, one reason for my adoration of Dickens, that he made London a place of dear delights, finding in crowded squares and quiet streets the human stories.
I was not a strong child, and my school-life was somewhat intermittent, but my father in my out-of-school days supervised my English as carefully as my mother supervised my manners. I had to write themes which my father blue-penciled, and so I came to girlhood and finally to womanhood with a rather easy gift of writing. But I really did not want to write. I was not in the least ambitious for a career. I was tremendously interested in people. I have, in fact, been always an intensely social person, liking my kind, and clinging somewhat stubbornly to old ideals of democracy and the doctrine that "a man's a man for a' that."
