At one time, her father essayed to lock her in a closet. Paula told him she would die if he did, and from the look upon the child's face, he could not doubt.... He had directly punished her once, and for years afterward, she could not repress a shudder at his touch. She would serve him in little things, bring him the choicest fruits and flowers; she anticipated his wants in the house and knew his habits as a caged thing learns the movements of its keepers; invariably, she was respectful and apt--until her will was challenged. Then her mother would weaken and her father passed on with a smile. "Paula does not permit me to forget that I have the honor to be her father," he once said. Reading grew upon her unconsciously. There was a time when she could not read, another when she could. She did not remember the transition, but one afternoon, when she was barely five, she sat for hours in the parlor still as a mole, save for the turning leaves--sat upon a hassock with Grimm. It was _The Foster Brother_ which pioneered her mind. That afternoon endured as one of the most exquisite periods of her life. The pleasure was so intense that she felt she must be doing wrong. Grimm explained the whole world, in proving the reality of fairies. The soul of the child had always been awake to influences her associates missed. Wonderful Grimm cleared many mysteries--the unseen activities of the woods, the visitors of the dark in her room before she was quite asleep; the invisible weaving behind all events. Later, books inevitably brought out the element of attraction between man and woman, but such were the refinements of her home that nothing occurred to startle her curiosity. It was left to the friendly woods to reveal a mystery and certain ultimate meanings.... She was sick with the force of her divining; the peace and purity of her mind shattered. The accruing revelations of human origin were all that she could bear. She rebelled against the manner of coming into the world, a heaven-high rebellion. Something of pity mingled with her reverence for her mother. For years, she could not come to a belief that the Most High God had any interest in a creature of such primal defilement. Queerly enough, it was the great preparer, Darwin, who helped her at the last. Man having come up through dreadful centuries from an earth-bent mouth and nostril, to a pitying heart and a lifted brow--has all the more hope of becoming an angel....