Amanda was charged not to tell
the young girl, Flora.

"There is no use in frightening that child over nothing," said Sophia.

Sophia, when she entered the southwest chamber, set the lamp which she
carried on the bureau, and began moving about the rooms pulling down
the curtains, taking off the nice white counterpane of the bed, and
preparing generally for the night.

As she did so, moving with great coolness and deliberation, she became
conscious that she was thinking some thoughts that were foreign to her.
She began remembering what she could not have remembered, since she was
not then born: the trouble over her mother's marriage, the bitter
opposition, the shutting the door upon her, the ostracizing her from
heart and home. She became aware of a most singular sensation as of
bitter resentment herself, and not against the mother and sister who
had so treated her own mother, but against her own mother, and then she
became aware of a like bitterness extended to her own self. She felt
malignant toward her mother as a young girl whom she remembered, though
she could not have remembered, and she felt malignant toward her own
self, and her sister Amanda, and Flora. Evil suggestions surged in her
brain--suggestions which turned her heart to stone and which still
fascinated her. And all the time by a sort of double consciousness she
knew that what she thought was strange and not due to her own volition.
She knew that she was thinking the thoughts of some other person, and
she knew who. She felt herself possessed.

But there was tremendous strength in the woman's nature. She had
inherited strength for good and righteous self-assertion, from the evil
strength of her ancestors. They had turned their own weapons against
themselves. She made an effort which seemed almost mortal, but was
conscious that the hideous thing was gone from her. She thought her
own thoughts. Then she scouted to herself the idea of anything
supernatural about the terrific experience. "I am imagining
everything," she told herself. She went on with her preparations; she
went to the bureau to take down her hair. She looked in the glass and
saw, instead of her softly parted waves of hair, harsh lines of
iron-gray under the black borders of an old-fashioned head-dress. She
saw instead of her smooth, broad forehead, a high one wrinkled with the
intensest concentration of selfish reflections of a long life; she saw
instead of her steady blue e