ves. But so strangely turns the wheel of time
that these ill-doing and barbarous scamps became a kind of moral
thermometer in the home of the gentle Irish lady in the early half of
the present century. For my mother has told me that when she had
committed some act of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking
gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, "Emily, your conduct
is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France." And Emily,
with her sweet grey Irish eyes and her curling masses of raven black
hair, would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some
vague idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would
despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their
disreputable majesties.

Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised
over her a power that made her shrink from aught that was unworthy,
petty or mean. To her the lightest breath of dishonour was to be
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 n