It required a longer time, however, than Mrs. Norris was inclined to allow, to reconcile Fanny to the novelty of Mansfield Park, a maze of rooms and people and crocodile-headed statuary and Osiris artifacts, and the separation from everybody she had been used to. Her feelings were very acute, and too little understood to be properly attended to. Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put themselves out of their way to secure her comfort. It was confusing for the child to watch Lady Bertram move about silently when she did not lie on the sofa or sort amulets in small caskets, and to disappear frequently upstairs near her own room, while strange frightful noises were often heard in the night. And oh, that pug! That strange little dog ran about like a miniature wolf cub, or possibly a very large cat, and made sounds the like of which Fanny had never heard in her life.

The holiday allowed to the Miss Bertrams the next day, on purpose to afford leisure for getting acquainted with, and entertaining their young cousin, produced little union. They could not but hold her cheap on finding that she had but two sashes, and had never learned French. And when they perceived her to be little struck with the duet they were so good as to play, they could do no more than make her a generous present of some of their least valued toys (primarily of Egyptian origin), and leave her to herself, while they adjourned to whatever might be the favourite holiday sport of the moment, making artificial flowers or wasting gold paper or pulling ostrich feathers out of oversized fans from Cairo.

Fanny, whether near or far from her cousins, whether in the schoolroom, the drawing-room, or the replica-of-the-Nile shrubbery, was equally forlorn, finding something to fear in every person and place, even the shadows, for it seemed that Mansfield Park was—oddly enough, an entity unto itself—alive. Or, better yet, undead.

She was disheartened by Lady Bertram’s sepulcral silence interspersed with abrupt references to archeological digs and the latest acquisitions of Egyptian Goddess Bast and crocodile-headed Sobek figurines on her bed chamber mantel, awed by Sir Thomas’s grave looks and severe distress upon each utterance of “Egypt,” or “cat,” or “crocodile-headed,” or “papyrus,” and quite overcome by Mrs. Norris’s wolfish admonitions and her tendency to shuffle about like a lumbering thing when she thought no one else was looking in her direction.

Fanny’s elder cousins mortified her by reflections on her size, and abashed her by noticing her shyness: Miss Lee wondered at her ignorance, and the maid-servants sneered at her clothes. And when to these sorrows was added the idea of the brothers and sisters among whom she had always been important as playfellow, instructress, and nurse, the despondence that sunk her little heart was severe.