imbued with it
from her cradle.

She was accustomed from her infancy to intellectual society; kept up to
listen, when she should have been in bed; she counted the spots on the
carpet, heard nothing that was said, and prided herself on being one of
such company. A little later, she was encouraged to talk to every body,
and give her opinion upon every thing, in order to improve and exercise
her mind. Her mind remained unexercised, because she talked without
thinking; but she learned to chatter, to repeat other people's opinions,
and fancy her own were of immense importance.

She was unlovely, because she sought only to please by means she had
not, and to please those who were quite beyond her reach; others she had
been accustomed to neglect as unfit for her companionship. She was
useless, because what she might have done well, she was unaccustomed to
do at all, and what she attempted, she was incapable of. And she was
unhappy, because all her natural tastes had been thwarted, and her
natural feelings suppressed; and of her acquired habits and
high-sounding pursuits she had no capacity for enjoyment. Her love of
classic and scientific lore, her delight in libraries, and museums, and
choice intellects, and literary circles, was a fiction; they gratified
nothing but her vanity. Her small, narrow, weak, and dependent mind, was
a reality, and placed her within reach of mortification and
disappointment, from the merest and meanest trifles.

Jemima--my little friend Jemima--I lived to see her a woman too. From
her infancy she had never evinced the tastes and feelings of a child.
Intense reflection, keen and impatient sensibility and an unlimited
desire to know, marked her from the earliest years as a very
extraordinary child; dislike to the plays and exercises of childhood
made her unpleasing to her companions, and, to superficial observers,
melancholy; but this was amply contradicted by the eager vivacity of her
intellect and feeling, when called forth by things beyond the usual
compass of her age. Every thing in Jemima gave promise of extraordinary
talent and distinguished character. This her parents saw, and were
determined to counteract. They had made up their minds what a woman
should be, and were determined Jemima should be nothing else. Every
thing calculated to call forth her powers was kept out of her way, and
childish occupations forced on her in their stead. The favorite maxim
was, to occupy her mind with common th