ten, capable of a certain amount of coquetry. Old _roués_, smelling of wine and tobacco, were eager to take me on their knees and pinch my soft flesh;--they would press my innocent lips with their withered ones,--withered and contaminated by the kisses of _cocottes_ and 'soiled doves' of the town!--I have often wondered how it is these men can dare to touch a young child's mouth, knowing in themselves what beasts they are! I see my nurse,--a trained liar and time-server, giving herself more airs than a queen, and forbidding me to speak to this child or that child, because they were 'beneath' me;--then came my governess, full of a prurient prudery, as bad a woman in morals as ever lived, yet 'highly recommended' and with excellent references, and wearing an assumption of the strictest virtue, like many equally hypocritical clergymen's wives I have known. I soon found her out,--for even as a child I was painfully observant,--and the stories she and my mother's French maid used to tell, in lowered voices now and then broken by coarse laughter, were sufficient to enlighten me as to her true character. Yet, beyond having a supreme contempt for the woman who practised religious austerity outwardly, and was at heart a rake, I gave small consideration to the difficult problem such a nature suggested. I lived,--how strange it seems that I should be writing now of myself, as past and done with!--yes, I lived in a dreamy, more or less idyllic state of mind, thinking without being conscious of thought, full of fancies concerning the flowers, trees and birds,--wishing for things of which I knew nothing,--imagining myself a queen at times, and again, a peasant. I was an omnivorous reader,--and I was specially fond of poetry. I used to pore over the mystic verse of Shelley, and judged him then as a sort of demi-god;--and never, even when I knew all about his life, could I realize him as a man with a thin, shrieking falsetto voice and 'loose' notions concerning women. But I am quite sure it was good for his fame that he was drowned in early youth with so many melancholy and dramatic surroundings,--it saved him, I consider, from a possibly vicious and repulsive old age. I adored Keats till I knew he had wasted his passion on a Fanny Brawn,--and then the glamour of him vanished. I can offer no reason for this,--I merely set down the fact. I made a hero of Lord Byron,--in fact he has always formed for me the only heroical type of poet. Strong in himself and pitiless in his love for women, he treated them for the most part as they merited, considering the singular and unworthy specimens of the sex it was his misfortune to encounter. I used to wonder, when reading these men's amorous lines, whether love would ever come my way, and what beatific state of emotion I should then enjoy.