I can picture her sitting upright
in some great chair by the shuttered window, peering out at the rank
grass and the elm trees, or else wandering, always majestic, from room
to room with her baby in her arms, listening to the silence. She cut
herself off from the world of the living as though she had been buried,
and she tried to bring up Emily as though they were in the land of the
dead.

"Emily was, of course, her only friend, her only companion, her only
link with life. Tragically enough, she was to fail her. She grew up, a
solitary, imperious child, I imagine much as she is now. She strikes me
as being one of those unfortunate natures who are as old at twelve as
they ever will be. Mother hinted at terrible scenes between the woman,
like a tragedy queen, and her baby, the child stormily demanding to be
like other children, the mother stonily listening and never bending her
ways. The will of the mother--I grow fanciful--was like ice-cold metal,
the child was hot with life, and the result was passionate rebellions,
followed by long weeks of sullen silence. And always Mrs. Drainger
hugged her isolation and hugged her child to that isolation because she
was her father's daughter. How or on what they lived, nobody knows.

"You understand," Fawcett interposed, "that this is mainly conjecture.
They were long before my day then. I am merely putting together what I
heard and my own inferences from what I have seen. And it seems to me,
looking back, that Mrs. Drainger set, as it were, when the captain died,
into that terrible fixed mold she was to wear ever after, and the lonely
child with the brilliant black eyes was not merely fighting solitude,
she was beating her passionate little fists against the granite of her
mother's nature. And I fancy that at an early age (she was very mature,
mind), Emily came to hate her mother quite earnestly and
conscientiously, and, so to speak, without meanness or malice.

"Of course it was impossible to keep the girl totally confined. She did
not, it is true, go to school, but she went out more or less, and in a
queer, unnatural way she made friends. That was later, however. She
never went to parties, since her mother would not give any and she was
proud--all the Draingers are proud. And she had no playmates. Until she
was a young woman, so far as human intercourse was concerned, Emily
might as well have had the plague in the house.

"But she went out as she grew older. For instance, she w