time as I do at the Rectory. The hours pass, and I get them
over somehow, but I do not live. I endure existence, but I rarely enjoy it.
Since Miss Keeldar and you came, I have been - I was going to say - happier, but
that would be untrue.« She paused.
    »How, untrue? You are fond of Miss Keeldar, are you not, my dear?«
    »Very fond of Shirley: I both like and admire her: but I am painfully
circumstanced: for a reason I cannot explain, I want to go away from this place,
and to forget it.«
    »You told me before you wished to be a governess; but, my dear, if you
remember, I did not encourage the idea. I have been a governess myself great
part of my life. In Miss Keeldar's acquaintance, I esteem myself most fortunate:
her talents and her really sweet disposition have rendered my office easy to me;
but when I was young, before I married, my trials were severe, poignant. I
should not like a -. I should not like you to endure similar ones. It was my lot
to enter a family of considerable pretensions to good birth and mental
superiority, and the members of which also believed that on them was perceptible
an unusual endowment of the Christian graces: that all their hearts were
regenerate, and their spirits in a peculiar state of discipline. I was early
given to understand, that as I was not their equal, so I could not expect to
have their sympathy. It was in no sort concealed from me that I was held a
burden and a restraint in society. The gentlemen, I found, regarded me as a
tabooed woman, to whom they were interdicted from granting the usual privileges
of the sex, and yet who annoyed them by frequently crossing their path. The
ladies too made it plain that they thought me a bore. The servants, it was
signified, detested me: why, I could never clearly comprehend. My pupils, I was
told, however much they might love me, and how deep soever the interest I might
take in them, could not be my friends. It was intimated, that I must live alone,
and never transgress the invisible but rigid line which established the
difference between me and my employers. My life in this house was sedentary,
solitary, constrained, joyless, toilsome. The dreadful crushing of the animal
spirits, the ever prevailing sense of friendlessness and homelessness consequent
on this state of things, began erelong to produce mortal