her. It was not merely
that she was pretty, but she suddenly assumed an air of graciousness and
dignity which captivated everyone. Some very little girls do acquire
this air: what its source is no one knows. In this case certainly not
Mr. and Mrs. Symons, who were particularly clumsy. Etta, as she was
called, was often summoned from the nursery when visitors came; so were
Minna and Louie her elder sisters, but all the ladies wanted to talk to
Etta. Minna and Louie had by this time, at nine and eleven, advanced to
the ugly, uninteresting stage, and they owed Henrietta a grudge because
she had annexed the petting that used to fall to them. They had their
revenge in whispering interminable secrets to one another, of which Etta
could hear stray sentences. "Ellen says she knows Arthur was very
naughty, because ... But we won't tell Etta." She was very susceptible
to notice, and the petting was not good for her.

When she was eight her zenith was past, and her plain stage began. Her
charm departed never to return, and she slipped back into
insignificance. At eight she could no longer be considered a baby to
play with, and a good deal of fault-finding was deemed necessary to
counteract the previous spoiling. In Henrietta's youth, sixty years ago,
fault-finding was administered unsparingly. She did not understand why
she was more scolded than the others, and decided that it was because
Ellen and Miss Weston and her mother had a spite against her.

Mrs. Symons was not fond of children, and throughout Henrietta's
childhood she was delicate, so that Henrietta saw very little of her.
Her chief recollections of her mother were of scoldings in the
drawing-room when she had done anything specially naughty.

If she had been one of two or one of three in a present-day family she
would have been more precious. But as one of four daughters--another
girl was born when she was eight--she was not much wanted. Mr. Symons
was a solicitor in a country town, and the problem of providing for his
seven, darkened the years of childhood for the whole Symons family. The
children felt that their parents found them something of a burden, and
in those days there was no cult of childhood to soften the hard reality.

The two older boys had a partnership together, into which they
occasionally admitted Minna and Louie. Minna and Louie had, beside their
secrets, a friend named Rosa. Harold, the youngest boy, did not want any
person--only toy engines. He a