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that happened to me since I arrived, so unwillingly, on the doorstep of my stepfather’s house in London. Perhaps I am only seeking excuses to escape into the past as a barrier against the present. Or perhaps I will understand better the whole train of events that led me here, once I set them down and can see them in perspective.
    Only a few years have passed since that time, and I am still a young woman. But so much has happened since then, and I have lost a great deal of the arrogance and self-assurance that they used to complain of. “They” were my mother and stepfather, and their large, anonymous household staff.
    The opinions of the servants didn’t concern me, for I was too occupied with my own thoughts and plans. I took care to stay out of the way of my mother and stepfather, and in all honesty, they were rather kind to me in those early days.
    With surprisingly mature logic I came to realize that I had, in effect, been forced upon my mother. I was unwanted. I was not a child of love, but the child of a man she had been compelled to marry. Mellyn, whom my mother still called Nanny, spoke bluntly to me on the subject. “Barely out of the schoolroom, my precious lamb was at the time,” she grumbled. “But they decided that she was ready to be married. He was much older than she was, had money, and the prospect of being an earl some day. I remember how she cried, her eyes turning all red and swollen. ‘I’m not ready to be married yet, Nanny, and he’s so old,’ she said to me. ‘I want to have fun first, to come out in style and go to parties and balls…’ but her feelings were never even taken into account! Guy Dangerfield met her at a house party, and as pretty as she was, he was taken by her, I suppose. He was looking for a wife, to please his father, and she was the one he chose.”
    According to Nanny, my father had had nothing to recommend him beyond the money he had made in the gold fields of America. He was a dark, gloomy man, she said, who preferred the country to the city, and would have made a recluse of his wife if he could.
    â€œI suppose he didn’t want me to be born either?” I questioned.
    â€œDon’t you talk like that, miss! You don’t know the whole of it, and that’s for sure! Your grandfather turned you against her, I’ll be bound, and for all that he’d have nothing to do with Mr. Guy after it all happened. He had a great notion that the Dangerfields were better than anyone else. My poor baby was no more than a child herself when you were born. I ask you, why couldn’t he have waited awhile? Why couldn’t he have taken her to live in London for a while? But no—he liked the country, he said, and he wanted a child. And he had his way. When you were born, it was just as if my poor Miss Fanny didn’t exist for him any longer. He fair doted on you, he did—had your nursery moved into the room next to his, and it was he got up at nights when you began to cry. ‘You take care of your baby, Mellyn,’ he’d tell me, ‘and I’ll look after mine.’ Unnatural, I called it. It was no wonder my lady pined and pined, and finally went off to London by herself. Who can blame her?”
    A few new clothes were purchased for me—all in somber colors, in deference to the fact that I was still in mourning. I refused to have my hair done up in tortured coils and ringlets and preferred more severe styles, and on the few occasions when I was dragged out to teas and small evening gatherings I always managed to find myself sitting with the older ladies present, who complimented me on my “old-fashioned looks.” I had none of the accomplishments that young ladies of my status in life were supposed to have. I could not play the pianoforte and I refused to sing; I could not paint a passable watercolor, and I could not dance.
    I always scared away the bolder and more persistent young