without thought of rule or compass, she sang her own
songs, painted flowers, and sketched landscapes from nature, visited
sociably all over the village, where she was a great favorite, ran about
through the fields, over fences, or in the woods with her little cottage
bonnet, and, above all, built her own little castles in the air without
any body to help pull them down, which we think about the happiest
circumstance in her situation.

But affairs wore a very different aspect when Mrs. Grey with her
daughters returned from Europe, as full of foreign tastes and notions as
people of an artificial character generally do return.

Poor Fanny was deluged with a torrent of new ideas; she heard of styles
of appearance and styles of beauty, styles of manner and styles of
conversation, this, that, and the other air, a general effect and a
particular effect, and of four hundred and fifty ways of producing an
impression--in short, it seemed to her that people ought to be of
wonderful consequence to have so many things to think and to say about
the how and why of every word and action.

Mrs. Grey, who had no manner of doubt of her own ability to make over a
character, undertook the point with Fanny as systematically as one would
undertake to make over an old dress. Poor Fanny, who had an
unconquerable aversion to trying on dresses or settling points in
millinery, went through with most exemplary meekness an entire
transformation as to all externals; but when Mrs. Grey set herself at
work upon her mind, and tastes, and opinions, the matter became somewhat
more serious; for the buoyant feeling and fanciful elements of her
character were as incapable of being arranged according to rule as the
sparkling water drops are of being strung into necklaces and earrings,
or the gay clouds of being made into artificial flowers. Some warm
natural desire or taste of her own was forever interfering with her
mother's _regime_; some obstinate little "Fannyism" would always put up
its head in defiance of received custom; and, as her mother and sisters
pathetically remarked, do what you would with her, she would always come
out herself after all.

After trying laboriously to conform to the pattern which was daily set
before her, she came at last to the conclusion that some natural
inferiority must forever prevent her aspiring to accomplish any thing in
that way.

"If I can't be what my mother wishes, I'll at least be myself," said she
one day to