I am an only child. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, and although there was no royal crest on it, yet no princess could be more comfortable in the purple than I was in the ordinary trappings of babyhood. From the cradle upwards I was surrounded with love and luxury. My pet name "Princess" fitted me like a glove. I was the autocrat of the nursery and my power scarce diminished when I rose to the drawing-room. My parents were very obedient and did not even conceal from me that I was beautiful. In short they did their best to spoil me, though I cannot admit that they succeeded. I lost them both before I was sixteen. My poor mother died first and my poor father followed within a week; whether from grief or from a cold caught through standing bareheaded in the churchyard, or from employing the same doctor, I cannot precisely determine. After the usual period of sorrow, I began to pick up a bit and to go out under the care of my duenna, a faded flower of the aristocracy whose declining years my guardian had soothed by quartering her on me. She was a gentle old spinster, the seventh daughter of a penniless peer, and although she has seen hard times and has almost been reduced to marriage, yet she has scant respect for my ten thousand a year. She has never lost the sense of condescension in living with me, and would be horrified to hear she is in receipt of a salary. It is to this sense of superiority on her part that I owe a good deal of the liberty I enjoy under her régime. She does not expect in me that rigid obedience to venerable forms and conventions which she prescribes for herself; she regards it as a privilege of the higher gentlewoman to be bound hand and foot by fashionable etiquette, and so long as my liberty does not degenerate into license I am welcome to as much as I please of it. She has continued to call me "Princess," finding doubtless some faint reverberation of pleasure in the magnificent syllables. I should add that her name is the Honorable Miss Primpole and that she is not afraid of the butler. Our town-house was situated in Portman Square and my parents tenanted it during the season. There is nothing very poetic about the Square, perhaps, not even in the summer, when the garden is in bloom, yet it was here that I first learnt to love. This dull parallelogram was the birthplace of a passion as spiritual and intangible as ever thrilled maiden's heart. I fell in love with a Voice.