A Lady of Quality : Original Text

In a remote wing of the house, in barren, ill-kept rooms, the poor infants of the dead lady had struggled through their brief lives, and given them up, one after the other.

Sir Jeoffry had not wished to see them, nor had he done so, but upon the rarest occasions, and then nearly always by some untoward accident.

The six who had died, even their mother had scarcely wept for; her weeping had been that they should have been fated to come into the world, and when they went out of it she knew she need not mourn their going as untimely.

The two who had not perished, she had regarded sadly day by day, seeing they had no beauty and that their faces promised none.

Naught but great beauty would have excused their existence in their father's eyes, as beauty might have helped them to good matches which would have rid him of them.

But 'twas the sad ill fortune of the children Anne and Barbara to have been treated by Nature in a way but niggardly.

They were pale young misses, with insignificant faces and snub noses, resembling an aunt who died a spinster, as they themselves seemed most likely to.

Sir Jeoffry could not bear the sight of them, and they fled at the sound of his footsteps, if it so happened that by chance they heard it, huddling together in corners, and slinking behind doors or anything big enough to hide them.

They had no playthings and no companions and no pleasures but such as the innocent invention of childhood contrives for itself.After their mother's death a youth desolate and strange indeed lay before them.

A spinster who was a poor relation was the only person of respectable breeding who ever came near them.

To save herself from genteel starvation, she had offered herself for the place of governess to them, though she was fitted for the position neither by education nor character.

Mistress Margery Wimpole was a poor, dull creature, having no wilful harm in her, but endowed with neither dignity nor wit.

She lived in fear of Sir Jeoffry, and in fear of the servants, who knew full well that she was an humble dependant, and treated her as one.

She hid away with her pupils in the bare school-room in the west wing, and taught them to spell and write and work samplers.

She herself knew no more.