clothes are
better-looking than those I buy in the East, at such fabulous prices,
from Cavendish."

Indeed, no woman was ever farther removed from personal vanity than Aunt
Mary. She looked like a little Quakeress. Her silvered hair was parted in
the middle and had, in spite of palpable efforts towards tightness and
repression, a perceptible ripple in it. Grey was her only concession to
colour, and her gowns and bonnets were of a primness which belonged to
the past. Repression, or perhaps compression, was her note, for the
energy confined within her little body was a thing to have astounded
scientists: And Honora grew to womanhood and reflection before she had.
guessed or considered that her aunt was possessed of intense emotions
which had no outlet. Her features were regular, her shy eye had the
clearness of a forest pool. She believed in predestination, which is to
say that she was a fatalist; and while she steadfastly continued to
regard this world as a place of sorrow and trials, she concerned herself
very little about her participation in a future life. Old Dr. Ewing, the
rector of St. Anne's, while conceding that no better or more charitable
woman existed, found it so exceedingly difficult to talk to her, on the
subject of religion that he had never tried it but once.

Such was Aunt Mary. The true student of human nature should not find it
surprising that she spoiled Honora and strove--at what secret expense,
care, and self-denial to Uncle Tom and herself, none will ever know--to
adorn the child that she might appear creditably among companions whose
parents were more fortunate in this world's goods; that she denied
herself to educate Honora as these other children were educated. Nor is
it astonishing that she should not have understood the highly complex
organism of the young lady we have chosen for our heroine, who was
shaken, at the age of thirteen, by unfulfilled longings.

Very early in life Honora learned to dread the summer, when one by one
the families of her friends departed until the city itself seemed a
remote and distant place from what it had been in the spring and winter.
The great houses were closed and blinded, and in the evening the servants
who had been left behind chattered on the front steps. Honora could not
bear the sound of the trains that drifted across the night, and the sight
of the trunks piled in the Hanburys' hall, in Wayland Square, always
filled her with a sickening longing. Would