other, my aunt had for the first time fully realized how little she knew
of me; she must surely have detected in my glance a strangeness, a
contemptuous indifference, an implacable obstinacy, which she had never
seen in it before. And, indeed, these things were in my glance. Yet I
loved my aunt with a deep affection. I had only one grievance against
her. Although excessively proud, she would always, in conversation with
men, admit her mental and imaginative inferiority, and that of her sex.
She would admit, without being asked, that being a woman she could not
see far, that her feminine brain could not carry an argument to the end,
and that her feminine purpose was too infirm for any great enterprise.
She seemed to find a morbid pleasure in such confessions. As regards
herself, they were accurate enough; the dear creature was a singularly
good judge of her own character. What I objected to was her assumption,
so calm and gratuitous, that her individuality, with all its confessed
limitations, was, of course, superior--stronger, wiser, subtler than
mine. She never allowed me to argue with her; or if she did, she treated
my remarks with a high, amused tolerance. 'Wait till you grow older,' she
would observe, magnificently ignorant of the fact that my soul was
already far older than hers. This attitude naturally made me secretive in
all affairs of the mind, and most affairs of the heart.

We took in the county paper, the _Staffordshire Recorder,_ and the _Rock_
and the _Quiver_. With the help of these organs of thought, which I
detested and despised, I was supposed to be able to keep discreetly and
sufficiently abreast of the times. But I had other aids. I went to the
Girls' High School at Oldcastle till I was nearly eighteen. One of the
mistresses there used to read continually a red book covered with brown
paper. I knew it to be a red book because the paper was gone at the
corners. I admired the woman immensely, and her extraordinary interest in
the book--she would pick it up at every spare moment--excited in me an