Now I know, too, that I exaggerated greatly the unfortunate family inheritance. My studies in this field, in subsequent years--inquiries into the family histories of many hundreds of persons--have shown me that my inheritance averages up well with that of most families. My own little knowledge in girlhood was a dangerous thing. Hypersensitive, and introspective to a degree, I took my own adolescent impressionability too seriously, losing sight of the fact that good as well as bad traits and tendencies are inherited; and that training, environment, and self-culture may do wonders to counteract undesirable proclivities. I assuredly locked the barn door before the horse was stolen and threw away the key. Though perhaps, in a way, so far as my sister was concerned, I was right, for she is of a more harmonious nature, more normal and typical, than I am. As to my brother, however, had I spent my life trying to bring about a deplorable hereditary combination, I could hardly have succeeded better than when, by the merest chance, and by my own act, I unwittingly enlisted Propinquity, which lost no time in bringing about his marriage with a neurotic girl who has since become the mother of his children. And yet four beautiful little beings (who seem to be unusually well endowed physically and mentally) gladden the lives of all of us, and as I reflect how much of the good and true there is in their inheritance, I am hopeful that, with such training and fortuitous environment as can be compassed, much can be done to counteract undesirable tendencies. But my soul sometimes contemplates all this--my early theories, and the actual conditions--with a grim smile: that it was I who brought it all about, I, the prudent one, the far-seeing, the stickler for observing the inexorable laws of heredity! FOOTNOTE: [3] The above was written in 1902. Now his hopes are nearly fulfilled, but he is no longer here to rejoice. All honour to him, and to others like him, who, true to their vision, were untiring in their efforts to bring it to realization! CHAPTER VII SCHOOL DAYS Serious as was my girlhood, as the sombre experiences and the resolutions which grew out of them show, it was by no means always so shadowed as this record would indicate. And it is a relief to turn from the detailed account of much of my inner life when a schoolgirl to more of the objective life, to sunnier memories, to the life within the school-house walls, even though to do so I go back for a little to the care-free days of early girlhood.