Long afterwards, Lydia, who never forgot the words, came to see them as the expression of man’s eternal wistful attempt to live on in the generation supplanting his own, but when her mother read them aloud to her, in a voice choked with tears, something in Lydia revolted violently. “My life is my own,” she thought stubbornly, “not just a continuation of somebody else’s.” With that acute clarity of vision that enabled her to analyze certain aspects of her childhood’s world with such astonishing maturity, she once told herself: “They don’t love me for myself at all. Grandpapa doesn’t love me the least bit--he doesn’t love anybody. And mother loves me because I’m _her_ child, and the aunts love me because I’m father’s child, and they think I’m a comfort to mother.” She could hardly remember her father, and though at first she had shed tears over his death, Lydia had quickly dried them. “Now, dear, you must be a good little girl and not cry and make poor mother more unhappy than she is already,” had said harassed-looking Aunt Evelyn. “You know you must think of her now. You’ll have to be her comfort.” And almost immediately afterwards Aunt Evelyn had said to Lydia’s mother: “Do, do give way and cry, dearie. It will be so much better for you. I know you’re wonderful, but you’ll suffer for it later on. You’re bound to.” After that it had not needed Aunt Evelyn’s further observation that “poor little Lydia didn’t know what her loss meant” to dry Lydia’s perfunctory tears with the sting of an inflexible pride. She would not cry again until they were prepared to concede to her the major right to affliction! She did not love her mother very much. It is more common than is generally allowed, for an intelligent child, still in bondage to her natural instinct, reinforced by the tradition of allegiance to natural authorities, to couple that allegiance with a perfectly distinct antipathy to the personality of either or both parents. Lydia’s dislike of her mother’s sentimentality, her constant vacillation of purpose, and her incessant garrulity, was only unchildlike in her calm analysis of it, and in the conscious restraint that she put upon it. Mrs. Raymond had often said, sometimes in Lydia’s hearing, that she would welcome death. “But for little Lydia, I think I should have put an end to it all long ago. But how can I leave her, when she only has me?” Mrs. Raymond, however, without any intervention of her own, when Lydia was twelve years old, reached the haven to which, since her husband’s death, she had so often aspired. “I am an orphan.” Lydia, already a dignified and self-contained little girl, bore herself with a new, pale composure.