avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into me, her only
daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of shame
or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept,
and a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour
never. A gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she
might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have
often thought that the training in this reticence and pride of honour
was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and
slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from
all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a
keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can
appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in
value outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant
feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of
foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud
either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart,
when condemnation was loudest: "I am not what you think me, and your
verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile whatever
you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
deem me to be now." And the very pride became a shield against
degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear
to become sullied in my own sight--and that is a thing not without its
use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends,
and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her
absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful
memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear
mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was
noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the