no way interfered
with me, and was quite unconscious of the subjects of my studies; she
thought me generally "a very odd girl," but though I occasionally took a
mischievous pleasure in perplexing her by fantastical propositions, to
which her usual reply was a rather acrimonious "Don't be absurd, Fanny,"
she did not at all care to investigate my oddity, and left me to my own
devices.

Among her books I came upon Wraxall's "Memoirs of the House of Valois,"
and, reading it with great avidity, determined to write an historical
novel, of which the heroine should be Francoise de Foix, the beautiful
Countess de Chateaubriand. At this enterprise I now set eagerly to work,
the abundant production of doggerel suffering no diminution from this
newer and rather soberer literary undertaking, to which I added a brisk
correspondence with my absent friend, and a task she had set me (perhaps
with some vague desire of giving me a little solid intellectual
occupation) of copying for her sundry portions of "Harris's Hermes;" a
most difficult and abstruse grammatical work, much of which was in
Latin, not a little in Greek. All these I faithfully copied, Chinese
fashion, understanding the English little better than the two dead
languages which I transcribed--the Greek without much difficulty, owing
to my school-day proficiency in the alphabet of that tongue. These
literary exercises, walks within bounds, drives with my aunt, and the
occasional solemnity of a dinner at Lord Essex's, were the events of my
life till my aunt, Mrs. Whitelock, came to Heath Farm and brought an
element of change into the procession of our days.

I think these two widowed ladies had entertained some notion that they
might put their solitude together and make society; but the experiment
did not succeed, and was soon judiciously abandoned, for certainly two
more hopelessly dissimilar characters never made the difficult
experiment of a life in common.

Mrs. Kemble, before she went to Switzerland, had lived in the best
London society, with which she kept up her intercourse by zealous
correspondence; the names of lords and ladies were familiar in her mouth
as household words, and she had undoubtedly an undue respect for
respectability and reverence for titled folk; yet she was not at all
superficially a vulgar woman. She was quick, keen, clever, and shrewd,
with the air, manner, dress, and address of a finished woman of the
world. Mrs. Whitelock was simple-hearted and