must I take
no share in the house-work, but that my delicate fingers must not be
spoilt by sewing or knitting. I only wonder that I did not become more
idle and vain than I actually was. But indeed to me, too, it seemed so
much a thing of course that I did not give it any particular thought.
Apricots have different flavours to wild pears, and cost different
sums. That is all very natural. One man has a hundred thousand dollars,
another a voice in his throat that bewitches people, a third is so
learned that all take off their hats to him, and _I_ was "the fair
Kate," with whom everybody fell in love. What the exact value of _that_
was--I mean the falling in love--I did not know; I had not found out
that I too had a heart, I was not even very fond of my own family,
because I found it tiresome to be always so much made of, and as to
falling in love with myself, that couldn't well happen, as I had been
used to my bit of red and white, and all the rest that people made such
a fuss about, from a child.

"'I had only one playfellow that I cared at all for, and for the very
reason that he was rather cross than kind to me; a youth different to
the rest, but neither particularly handsome or lively, and one of the
poorest. His father shipped charcoal up and down the Rhine, and worked
very hard; his mother was a quiet sickly woman, always at home or in
the church, with a sorrowful face that made me feel ashamed of my smart
clothes. Her son, too--he was about five years older than I, and had
often to help his father--would look more crossly than ever out of his
eyes if he met me on a Sunday, when my mother had decked me with all
sorts of colours. He made no remarks, but he always avoided me on those
occasions, and childish as I was, and vain, too, of being the fair
Kate, this never failed to give me a pang. I would contrive to get into
my every-day clothes to creep down about twilight to the banks of the
Rhine where his cottage stood, and I was quite happy if Hans Lutz would
only be good-natured to me and say, "Now you look like a human being
again, and not like a doll." He had a way--silent as he was--of amusing
me better than anybody else, would cut me out little boats of bark that
rode at anchor in a little harbour that he built; he could play me my
favourite airs on a reed-pipe, and it was often night, and I had to be
scolded away before I would consent to part from him.

"'You see already what that was leading to. I could no l