remember the great gathering of all the relations from near and far, and
the grey heads of the family friends paying her the homage of respect
and love in the house of her favourite brother who, a few years later,
was to take the place for me of both my parents.

I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time,
though indeed I remember that doctors also came. There were no signs of
invalidism about her--but I think that already they had pronounced her
doom unless perhaps the change to a southern climate could re-establish
her declining strength. For me it seems the very happiest period of my
existence. There was my cousin, a delightful quick-tempered little girl,
some months younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over, as
if she were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year.
There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and not a
few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all this hung the oppressive
shadow of the great Russian Empire--the shadow lowering with the
darkness of a newborn national hatred fostered by the Moscow school of
journalists against the Poles after the ill-omened rising of 1863.

This is a far cry back from the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," but the public
record of these formative impressions is not the whim of an uneasy
egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant in their appeal.
It is meet that something more should be left for the novelist's
children than the colours and figures of his own hard-won creation. That
which in their grown-up years may appear to the world about them as the
most enigmatic side of their natures and perhaps must remain for ever
obscure even to themselves, will be their unconscious response to the
still voice of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and
their personalities are remotely derived.