t ten years old she perfectly understood that she
was one of the Boyces of Brookshire, and that her great-uncle had been a
famous Speaker of the House of Commons. The portrait of this great-uncle
had hung in the dining room of that pretty London house which now seemed
so far away; her father had again and again pointed it out to the
child, and taught her to be proud of it; and more than once her childish
eye had been caught by the likeness between it and an old grey-haired
gentleman who occasionally came to see them, and whom she called
"Grandpapa." Through one influence and another she had drawn the glory
of it, and the dignity of her race generally, into her childish blood.
There they were now--the glory and the dignity--a feverish leaven,
driving her perpetually into the most crude and ridiculous outbreaks,
which could lead to nothing but humiliation.

"I wish my great-uncle were here! _He'd_ make you remember--you
great--you great--big bully you!"--she shrieked on one occasion when she
had been defying a big girl in authority, and the big girl--the stout
and comely daughter of a local ironmonger--had been successfully
asserting herself.

The big girl opened her eyes wide and laughed.

"_Your_ great-uncle! Upon my word! And who may he be, miss? If it comes
to that, I'd like to show _my_ great-uncle David how you've scratched my
wrist. He'd give it you. He's almost as strong as father, though he is
so old. You get along with you, and behave yourself, and don't talk
stuff to me."

Whereupon Marcella, choking with rage and tears, found herself pushed
out of the schoolroom and the door shut upon her. She rushed up to the
top terrace, which was the school playground, and sat there in a hidden
niche of the wall, shaking and crying,--now planning vengeance on her
conqueror, and now hot all over with the recollection of her own
ill-bred and impotent folly.

No--during those first two years the only pleasures, so memory
declared, were three: the visits of the cake-woman on Saturday--Marcella
sitting in her window could still taste the three-cornered puffs and
small sweet pears on which, as much from a fierce sense of freedom and
self-assertion as anything else, she had lavished her tiny weekly
allowance; the mad games of "tig," which she led and organised in the
top playground; and the kindnesses of fat Mademoiselle Renier, Miss
Frederick's partner, who saw a likeness in Marcella to a long-dead small
sister of her own,