Too many things hurt Elizabeth: Aunt Anne’s disapproval, consciousness of wrong-doing, and the cat’s kittens being drowned. If you fell short of Aunt Anne’s ideal of you, she was grieved and worried, and her annoyance made you feel worm-like and unhappy. It was better to pretend always, even to yourself, that you liked the things Aunt Anne wanted you to like. She was convinced that skipping was a pastime that should appeal to you. If you thought it dull, then you were extraordinary, and unchildlike, and you had to bring your brain down from the heights to which it had climbed, and force it to enjoy an amusement it had outgrown three years ago.

So to please Aunt Anne Elizabeth did this, and all the other things that were expected of her, and she did not allow herself to think that they were silly, or that she disliked them, because it was evident that she ought not to think that.

She did not go to school; she had a governess who taught her that Alfred burned the cakes, and that if one straight line stands on another straight line so that the adjacent angles are equal, they are both right angles. Her knowledge of literature was always defective, because there were so many writers of whom Aunt Anne disapproved. Shelley was banned because his private life did not bear inspection; Swinburne was a modern, and therefore unreadable; Byron had written a very disgusting poem called “Don Juan” (Miss Arden had not read any of Byron’s poems, but she had heard that this was so) and therefore Elizabeth was forbidden to read his works. Wordsworth and Tennyson were given to Elizabeth, and the copy of Tennyson was well-worn and had the more trite passages underlined in pencil.

When Miss Arden was a girl everyone was rapturous in praise of Dickens, though of course it was a pity he had written such a horrid book as “Pickwick Papers.” Elizabeth was given the “Old Curiosity Shop” to read, with assurances that it was a sweet tale and one that would make her cry. Elizabeth did not cry, because she did not think that little Nell was at all pathetic. She preferred Dick Swiveller, but as Miss Arden evidently expected her to rave over the tragedy and the general sugariness of little Nell, she said that she thought it was lovely. Gradually she cheated herself into believing this, so that when she read “Dombey and Son” she managed to feel quite a lump at the back of her throat at the death of Paul. If she had not felt this lump Miss Arden would have said that she didn’t know how Elizabeth could read those passages without a tear, and further, that she shuddered to think what the younger generation was coming to.