It was in my midsummer holidays that the thing happened, and it was
through the Honourable Beatrice Normandy. She had "come into my life,"
as they say, before I was twelve.

She descended unexpectedly into a peaceful interlude that followed the
annual going of those Three Great Women. She came into the old nursery
upstairs, and every day she had tea with us in the housekeeper's room.
She was eight, and she came with a nurse called Nannie; and to begin
with, I did not like her at all.

Nobody liked this irruption into the downstairs rooms; the two "gave
trouble,"--a dire offence; Nannie's sense of duty to her charge led to
requests and demands that took my mother's breath away. Eggs at unusual
times, the reboiling of milk, the rejection of an excellent milk
pudding--not negotiated respectfully but dictated as of right. Nannie
was a dark, longfeatured, taciturn woman in a grey dress; she had a
furtive inflexibility of manner that finally dismayed and crushed and
overcame. She conveyed she was "under orders"--like a Greek tragedy. She
was that strange product of the old time, a devoted, trusted servant;
she had, as it were, banked all her pride and will with the greater,
more powerful people who employed her, in return for a life-long
security of servitude--the bargain was nonetheless binding for being
implicit. Finally they were to pension her, and she would die the hated
treasure of a boarding-house. She had built up in herself an enormous
habit of reference to these upstairs people, she had curbed down all
discordant murmurings of her soul, her very instincts were perverted or
surrendered. She was sexless, her personal pride was all transferred,
she mothered another woman's child with a hard, joyless devotion that
was at least entirely compatible with a stoical separation. She treated