my
awkward hands inflicted on themselves with their tiny weapon.

And so the years went on. It was a pity that no babies came to soften
our hearts, my step-mother's and mine, and to draw us nearer together as
only the presence of children can. A household without children is
always hard and angular, even when surrounded by all the softening
influences of refinement and education. What was ours with its poverty
and roughness, its every-day cares and its endless discomforts? One day
was like all the rest, and in their wearying succession they rise up in
my memory like ghosts of the past coming to lay their cold, death-like
hands on the feebly kindling hopes of the present. I see myself now, as
I look back, a tall, awkward girl of fifteen, with my long, straggling,
sunburnt hair, my sallow, yet pimply complexion, my small, weak-looking
blue eyes, that every exposure to the sun and wind would redden, and my
long, lean hands and arms, that offended my sense of beauty constantly,
as I dwelt on their hopelessly angular turns. I had one beauty; so my
little paper-framed glass, that rested on the rough rafter that edged
the sloping roof of my garret, told me, whenever I took it down to gaze
in it, which, but for that beauty, would have been but seldom. It was a
finely cut and firmly set mouth and chin. There was, and I felt it,
beauty and character in the curves of the lips, in the rounding of the
chin; there was even a healthy ruddiness in the lips, and something of
delicacy in the even, well-set teeth that showed themselves when they
parted.

The gazing at these beauties gave me great pleasure, not for any effect
they might ever produce in others,--what did I know of that?--but
because I had in myself a strong love of the beautiful, a passion for
grace of form and brilliancy of color which made doubly distasteful to
me our bare, uncouth walls, with their ugly, straight-backed chairs, and
their frightfully painted yellow or red tables and chests-of-drawers.

My step-mother's appearance, too, was a constant offence to my
beauty-loving eye,--with her lank, tall figure, round which clung those
narrow skirts of "bit" calico, dingy red or dreary brown,--her feet shod
in the heavy store-shoes which were brought us from Catlettsburg by the
returning flat-boat men,--her sharp-featured face, the forehead and
cheeks covered with brown, mouldy-looking spots, the eyes deep-set, with
a livid, dyspeptic ring around them, and the lips thin