The only annoyance she suffered arose from the great influx of visiters. Having lived a life disjoined from the crowd, she soon began to conceive the hermitess, delight in loneliness, and the vexation of being intruded upon by the frivolous and indifferent. She found that she loved friends, but hated acquaintance. Nor was this strange. Her mind was quite empty of conventional frivolities. She had not been at a ball twice in her life, and then only when a mere child; yet all had been interest and occupation. To unbend with her was to converse with a friend--to play with children--or to enjoy the scenes of nature with one who felt their beauties with her. "It was hard labour," she often said, "to talk with people with whom she had not one pursuit--one taste in common." Often when a barouche, crowded with gay bonnets, appeared, she stole away. Lady Cecil could not understand this. Brought up in the thick of fashionable life, no person of her clique was a stranger; and if any odd people called on her--still they were in some way entertaining; or if _bores_--bores are an integral portion of life, not to be shaken off with impunity, for, as oysters, they often retain the fairest pearls in close conjunction. "You are wrong," said Lady Cecil. "You must not be a savage--I cannot have mercy on you; this little jagged point in your character must be worn off--you must be as smooth and glossy in exterior as you are incalculably precious in the substance of your mind." Elizabeth smiled; but not the less when a sleek, self-satisfied dowager, all smiles to those she knew--all impertinent scrutiny to the unknown--and a train of ugly old women in embryo--called, for the present, misses--followed, each honouring her with an insolent stare. "There was a spirit in her feet," and she could not stay, but hurried out into the woodland dells, and with a book, her own reveries, and the beautiful objects around her, as her companions; and feeling ecstatically happy, both at what she possessed, and what she had escaped from. Thus it was one day that she deserted Lady Cecil, who was smiling sweetly on a red-faced gouty squire, and listening placidly to his angry wife, who was complaining that her name had been put too low down in some charity list. She stole out from the glass door that opened on the lawn, and, delighted that her escape was secure, hurried to join the little group of children whom she saw speeding beyond into the park. "Without a bonnet, Miss Falkner!" cried Miss Jervis. "Yes; and the sun is warm. You are not using your parasol, Miss Jervis; lend it me, and let us go into the shade." Then, taking her favourite child by the hand, she said, "Come, let us pay visits. Mamma has got some visiters; so we will go and seek for some. There is my Lord Deer and pretty Lady Doe. Ah! pretty Miss Fawn, what a nice dappled frock you have on!"