Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III NARCISSA At the age of thirteen, Margaret fell violently in love. She fell in love " at first sight " (her life-long pattern for this process) with a stranger, whom she saw at church. The stranger was an English lady, who played the harp and read Sir Walter Scott. It was a sentimental and passing attachment, not a profound and life-long influence like Mary Wollstonecraft's for Fanny Blood. Margaret replaced the adored one from time to time by other matrons equally adored, but the original impression was never effaced. All her pent-up feelings seized upon the strange lady as a drowning man clutches at a straw. " It was my first real interest in my kind, and it engrossed me wholly. I had seen her,—I should see her,—and my mind lay steeped in the visions that flowed from this source. My task-work I went through with, as I have done on similar occasions all my life, aided by pride that could not bear to fail, or be questioned. Could I cease from doing the work of the day, and hear the reason sneeringly given,—' Her head is so com- pletely taken up with that she can do nothing? ' Impossible ... I can tell little else of this time,— indeed, I remember little, except the state of feeling in which I lived." She was unable to cope with her excessive grief when the stranger went away. " Those who are really children could not know such love, or feel such sorrow," she comments. She fell into a complete hysterical innervation,—" I knew not how to exert myself, but lay bound hand and foot,"—and soon took refuge in outright sickness. The robust and energetic girl was genuinely ill. For the first time, her father began to suspect that there was something wrong. He suddenly discovered that she needed to be with girls of her own age. But already the Cambridge girls w...