n age varying from twelve to
fourteen. They studied because they would be called upon to recite, and
recited fairly well for fear of reproof and bad marks should they be
derelict. Out of school, books and bookish thoughts were cast to the
four winds of heaven. Their talk was cheery chatter, as brainless as the
rattle of grasshoppers in the summer grass.

Mary 'Liza towered above them in scholastic attainments, although the
junior of the youngest of them, keeping at the head of every class with
unostentatious ease. I am afraid that I may have done my orphaned cousin
seeming injustice in former chapters of this autobiography. Her temper
was even, and her nature was finer than her prim, priggish ways would
have led the casual acquaintance to suppose. She was
ultra-conscientious, and naturally so exemplary that her good behavior
was a snare. She could not sympathize with my temptations to naughtiness
and many falls from good-girlhood. I mention this to introduce what was
a surprise to me at the time. She never joined in the persecutions of me
that were the labor and the pastime of the other girls. It would have
been asking too much to expect her to champion me openly. I was
affectionately grateful to her for holding herself aloof when baiting me
was the amusement of the hour.

My mother had lamented that I took life so much to heart. It took itself
to my heart now, uninvited. I was headstrong and headlong, hot in love,
and honest in hatred; with a brain full of absurd fancies, all of which
were beloved by their author. I had browsed at will in my father's
library, poring by the hour over books twenty years too old for me, yet,
by mental cuticular absorption, taking in and assimilating much that
contributed to the formation of taste and character. My familiar use of
language that sounded pedantic because I got it from books, my frequent
references to characters I had known in print, were gibberish and
vanity of vanities to my new associates. My very plays were
unintelligible to girls who had never heard of William Wallace, and
Robert Bruce, and Thaddeus of Warsaw, or read, on Sunday afternoons, of
Tobias and the Angel, Judith and Holofernes, and Christiana and her
children.

Not one of the four had an intellectual ambition. Mary 'Liza's
scholarship did not excite their envy because she was quiet and
inoffensive. Proficiency in her studies was "one of her ways." I was
talkative and aggressive, and needed taking down. They