I awoke to find myself in my Grandmother's bed. Evening was darkening the room. Uncle Simeon had already come—and gone.

Precisely what had taken place I was not told, but according to Mrs. Cheese neither my Grandmother nor my Great-Aunt had minced their words. Aunt Jael, particularly, must have been in awful form. Though I had not yet told my tale, my condition must have spoken for itself; and if Aunt Jael's sympathy for me was not alone sufficient to pitch her to the highest key of scorn, the sight of her old enemy made good the deficiency. Even for him he must have cringed and whined exceptionally, being quite in the dark as to how much I had told. Whether the flagellative heart of my Great-Aunt was filled with professional jealousy or whether the new rÔle of Tender and Merciful appealed to her for the moment, all that is certain is this: that she drove Master Simeon Greeber with words and scorpions over the doorstep, adding that he was never required to cross it again. Nor did he. I was many years older when next we met: under what circumstances the sequel will shew.

When I regained my health, which under my Grandmother's care and feeding was speedily enough, I was surprised to find how little Grandmother and Aunt Jael pressed me for details of my life at Torribridge. This incuriousness puzzled me: chiefly by contrast with what my own interest would have been in their place. Details of other people's doings and sayings were to become one of the absorbing passions of my life: I was born with my mind at a keyhole. Hence Tuesday afternoons, when they could be diverted from godly generalities to piquant personalities were more welcome than of old; and now that I was occasionally allowed to speak a word at Clinkerian ceremonies, I became quite deft in sidetracking Miss Salvation down the pathways of scandal, where Aunt Jael, not too reluctantly, would sometimes follow her. Aunt Jael, to do her justice, was not much of a gossip: she was too selfish, just as my Grandmother was too unselfish, too deeply absorbed in Aunt Jael ever to feel deep interest, even a scandal-mongering interest, in other people: while her suspicion that her own efforts were capable of similar sacrilegious discussion would not allow her to allow me to talk of Uncle Simeon's beatings and persecutions. She felt that however objectionable Uncle Simeon might be, she would not permit me—a child, a subject, a slave—to discuss him. Authority must be upheld, in whatever unpleasant quarters. In the Tacit Alliance and Trade Union for Cruelty to Children there must be no blacklegs.

My Grandmother was the most incurious woman I have ever known: partly because of her inherent good nature, which made her regard all chatter about others as unkindly; partly because of her religion, which enabled her to see, though I think to exaggerate, the unimportance of earthly things. To every question, every trouble, every accusation, every wrong, she would everlastingly reply: "What will it matter in a hundred years?" and then, "Anyhow, 'tis the Lord's will." With a character thus compounded of kindness, unworldliness and fatalism, Grandmother was never born to pry. It quite irritated me how little she asked me about my life at Uncle Simeon's. I had believed myself the centre of the universe, the victim of the cruellest wrongs in human story; and here was my Grandmother thinking it friendly and loving and sympathetic to say "Don't 'ee brood over it, my dear. Forget it all. 'Twill seem little in a hundred years from now!"

Apart however from this pique that my miseries should be denied the glory of posthumous fame, I was glad that I was left alone with the past eight months of my life. I could hide without subterfuge my friendship with Robbie. Naturally, and artfully, I mentioned him sometimes.

"Such a nice little boy, Grandmother; he was really! We liked each other—ever so!"

Always my favourite form of insincerity: to tell the literal truth, while conveying by the context or my manner something much less—i. e. morally speaking, not the truth at all. I loved him; I told Grandmother I liked him. It was the truth, and a lie.

I also kept hidden in my own breast the chief events of New Year's Night.

* * * * * * *

Within a few weeks the eight months of Torribridge seemed infinitely far away: as though it were some one else's life I was contemplating from a distant mountain-peak. I have always found that the more complete my change of surroundings, the more distant does my previous life immediately become; until some sudden messenger from the earlier days brings it back with a vivid rush. I never lived again the present-moment horror, as it were, of that life with Uncle Simeon until one day, far ahead, when I realized with frightening suddenness, as I gazed at a certain face beside me, that those eyes, that smile, that gesture—were his.

I fell back almost insensibly into the old groove of Bear Lawn life: the bare empty-seeming silent house, the long days of loneliness and godliness, pinings and prayers, the two familiar black-clad figures in the old familiar horse-hair chairs, the harsh staccato jobations proceeding from one side of the fireplace, and the gentler but no less continual "Don't 'ee do it's!" from the other. Torribridge was soon a nightmare episode shot through with glad dreams more episodal still. This life in this house that had sheltered my first memories was, after all, my real life; was Life. It seemed as though I had never known any other; I often cannot remember whether certain things happened before or after Torribridge: my Bear Lawn life was all one.

Nevertheless a few notable changes marked my return.

First of all, I was received as a full member of the Lawn confraternity. Aunt Jael allowed me to go out and play: ay, with this selfsame famous tribe through whose frankness in grappling with fundamentals I had been disgraced and sent away.

"No filth, mind! No low talk. No abominations."

Nor were there. Filth, low talk and abominations had departed with Joseph Jones to his draper's apprenticeship in a big city—this was one of the large events of my absence—and what Bristol gained, Tawborough lost. Under the new rule of Laurie Prideaux I heard no more of the talk to which my six weeks under Joe had been accustoming me. The change of chieftainship meant a change in the tone of the whole community. Joe bullied and sneered if you wouldn't use his words; Laurie thrashed Ted King for using them. One boy changed the moral outlook of a Lawn; a generation, a town, a world! Under Laurie's patronage I was received into full membership. Under which flag? After a moving discussion, in which arguments charged with the nicest theological insight jostled with mere vulgar prejudice against my clothes (this was the Tompkins girl, over-dressed and under-witted little cat that she was), it was decided that the Chapel League was best fitted to receive me to its nonconformist bosom. I could not help feeling it a come-down that a Saint should be classed, as it were officially, with mere Dissenters: it was, however, the lesser of two evils, for the Church of England, after all, was something worse than "mere."

I was never much good at the various games, tig, French cricket, rounders and the like, which occupied so large a part of Lawn life. The amorous ones—Kiss in the Ring and Shy Widow—I shunned altogether. I was too serious, or too sensitive, or high-minded, or morbid, to be able to regard touch as a plaything sentiment. Laurie and Marcus were nice boys, and I liked them, quite definitely; but I refused to respond when they "chose" me for their lady. In these games of sentiment and shy surrender, the challenge of choice must be accepted without flush or murmur: I could not, so refused to take part. Kissing was too precious a privilege. I cherished it for three people only: my Mother when I sought the gates of Heaven; myself when on my own lips in the looking-glass I tried to discover the mystery of this world; Robbie, when I needed Love.

I acquired, however, a certain position of my own in Lawn esteem: the teller of stories. My subject was Aunt Jael; her ways, words and deeds; her rods and ropes; her food and medicine cupboards, her winsome underclothing, awful wrath, and appetite diurnal and nocturnal. I told of the beetle and of the Great God; and of far beatings. The Lawn listened, admired and applauded; admitted in me something they did not possess; the power to interest and to amuse. Thus they decided my fate for me, in showing me the thing in which I was different from and better than others; and Mary Lee, silent and morose by instinct, by upbringing and by environment, set up for life as an amateur-professional raconteuse. That way lay success, and success is what we seek. In forcing myself to talk that I might bask in the amusement of the other children, I gradually lost some of the moodiness and glumness of my earlier days; later on in life, in still more favourable surroundings, I lost them altogether: that is, in the face I showed to the world. The simple need of status with the Lawn children drove me to do the one thing I could do: to talk, and so to discover my talent and overlay my original nature. Thus it is ambition that transforms character, rather than character ambition. Thus it was that Aunt Jael provided me with the capital for my new venture, and paid handsomely for all her oppressions. An eye for an eye, a Lawn laugh for every blow!

The Elementary Educational Establishment was now beneath my needs, so I was transferred from the Misses Clinker (who, while far above vile pecuniary jealousy, prophesied ill) to the seminary of the Misses Primp. The latter were Saints, obscure but regular at the Great Meeting, and socially above the ruck. "Reg'lar standoffish, wi' the pride ur the flesh in their 'earts," declared Miss Salvation, who saw clearly from her altitude far above vile pecuniary jealousy. They held their school in a bleak house with a big bare garden, to the north of the town, ten minutes or so from the Lawn. The curriculum embraced Arithmetic to the Rule of Three, Composition, Grammar, French, Literature (Sacred and Profane), Needlework (Plain and Fancy), Drawing (Freehand and Design); Botany and Brushwork; together with "a thorough grounding in the principles of Salvation."

Not to put too fine a point upon it, this last pretension was a lie. A Bible-reading, usually Kings or Chronicles, read with parrot-quickness round the class, one verse to each pupil; a long dry prayer offered up, with eyes gimletted not on heaven but on us, by Miss Prudence Primp; and a longer and still drier homily by Miss Obedience Primp, a gaunt old lady with a gigantic crinoline and a parched soul and throat—in a later, more worldly age, this allowance of heavenly fare may not seem so niggardly; to me, bred as it were in the imperial purple of Grace, the whole performance appeared perfunctory and tepid, and the Primpian acquaintance with the principles of salvation positively sketchy. My studies were remarkable only for their unevenness. The net result of my inequalities was that I occupied a steady middle-place in the weekly marks. I reflected with pride, however, that it was no ordinary middle-place, the result of humdrum averageness in everything: and I was vainer of being bad at my bad subjects than good at my good ones. Were they not stupid subjects in which a quite special unique set-apart Chosen little girl like myself would not stoop to shine? Tots indeed! Brushwork!

I do not recall many events in my school life. Those that recur to me are chiefly unpleasant; how some of the girls cribbed and copied and cheated and lied; how others giggled sickeningly at the word "boys," or mocked shamefully at their mothers and fathers. They were red-letter days when Cissie King, my Lawn enemy, had a fit, foamed at the mouth, went green in the face, was obdurate under basinsful of water, and only came round at the third dose of brandy; or when Miss Obedience quarrelled openly with Miss Prudence in front of the whole school, and cried "Leave me, woman!" Nor can I forget my first day, when Miss Obedience, as we were leaving after the morning school, asked two of the older girls who lived my way to accompany me home, and I overheard them say to each other "Not likely! We'll leave her at the school gate; wouldn't be seen with her, with her frock all darned and nasty common clothes and boots, would you? If anybody should think she belonged to us!" How my cheeks burned, how I hated and loathed those two giggling little snobs, and still more my own uncomely person and garments. How I brooded for days and gnawed at the shame. These are the real events of a child's life; they sound the depths of human passion: shame, jealousy and hate.

One other major event followed close upon my return. Wedding Bells! For five and forty years had Miss Salvation Clinker been pursuing Brother Brawn; now the long chase was ended, and the quarry at last secured. She was seventy-seven, he but seventy-one. How on a secret visit one morning she broke the news to Grandmother, postponing vainly the Jaelian wrath to come; how later that wrath fell ("Bold woman of Proverbs seven-twelve, who lieth in wait at every corner," said Denouncer; "I shall do more than some as I know, and go to 'Eaven a wedded wife," answered Denounced, brazen in vanishing-maidenhood)—while scorn and pity were showered upon the victim; how Aunt Jael's ban went forth, and the banns despite it; how they became man and wife; how she had her Triumph, and dragged him through the streets of Tawborough in an open carriage ... this and much more I might portray.

The mild scandal in our Meeting was as nothing to the rage and horror in the Upper Room for Celibate Saints. At a solemn mass-meeting of the survivors, nigh half a dozen strong, Doctor Obadiah Tizzard decreed: that Glory Clinker, aider and abetter in evil, be then and thenceforward struck from the sacred roll and flung into outer darkness; that against Salvation, nÉe Clinker, sinner of sinners, be pronounced the Major Excommunication.

The "Upper's" gain was our loss. Henceforward the Clinkers were always with us. (Nobody favoured Salvation with her new surname.) But the chief loser by her change of state was, alas, poor Brother Brawn. The sisters let the High Street Mansion, the aforetime E.E.E., and moved, inseparably, into the White House. There, sandwiched between a gentle dÉtraquÉe and a scolding shrew, our bleating leader found repentance, if no leisure more.

"I told 'ee so," said Aunt Jael. "'E've done it now. There is no hope."

The husband certainly had none, though his spouse, dreamily quoting Luke-one-thirteen, declared that she had, and the good sister-in-law er-er-er'd and plied her unsteady needle on swaddling-clothes, while muttering always to herself "John! Thou shalt call his name John!" ...

Neither school nor Lawn nor Clinkers, however, seemed anything but incidental to my life in the big house at Number Eight, always for me the first of external things. Here too there were changes.

Mrs. Cheese had come back. Servant after servant had passed away like that grass which in the morning groweth up and in the evening withereth away. Stability reigned in the kitchen once more. Relations with Aunt Jael partook of the nature of an armed truce. Both restrained themselves, Mrs. Cheese because she wanted to stay, Aunt Jael because she wanted her to; though the former was a bit too fond of making it clear that she had come back to us for my Grandmother's sake only, "and not to plaize zome others I cude mention." Despite her loyal affection for my Grandmother, the real person for whose sake she had come back was herself. At sixty she was too old to break with old habits, such as our kitchen and her routine therein, or with Aunt Jael, who was a habit also, if a bad one.

From this time Grandmother occupies a larger place in my memories than Aunt Jael. Why, I am somewhat puzzled to say; for their life, and my life with them, went on just as of old. Perhaps now that beatings became rarer, it was natural that she whose skill therein had been the terror of my earlier childhood should loom less large. Perhaps it was that Aunt Jael, my bad angel, appeared tame in her badness by the side of Uncle Simeon (but then should Grandmother, my good angel, have become faint in my affections besides Robbie; whereas I liked her better and thought of her more). Perhaps it was that Grandmother's gentler qualities would naturally have made less impression on a little child than Aunt Jael's harsh ones, or anybody's good qualities than anybody's bad ones. Further, I now saw more of Grandmother, as Aunt Jael developed the habit of confining herself to her bedroom for days at a stretch, only emerging on to the landing to rain curses over the banisters on Mrs. Cheese for a useless, shiftless idler, unfit to wait on a suffering bedridden old martyr, or on Grandmother for a selfish, ungrateful sister always absent from her elder's bed of pain; or (oftenest) on me.

With outdoor exercise and good food, which now for the first time I enjoyed together, I became healthier and I think happier. Though I still lived for my daydreams, I had less time on my hands.

What with dusting and bed-making and cooking, what with homework and meals and prayers and ceaseless reading of the Word in public and private, and Aunt Jael's and Grandmother's expositions, I found my days too full to yield the time I needed for thinking and talking to myself: for living. I got into the habit of stealing odd quarters-of-an-hour in the attic. Aunt Jael was on my scent in a moment. How I loathed her when a luxurious heart-to-heart talk between Mary and Myself was interrupted by her hoarse scolding voice.

"Child! Child! Now then. Down from the garret, now. No monkey tricks."

Perhaps as an attraction to hold me downstairs, the portals of the dining-room bookcase were at last thrown open to me. The wealth therein would have seemed meagre, perhaps, to worldlier spirits; to me, for whom all books save One (and one other) had always been closed, it was a gold mine. Of unequal yield. With some of the more desiccated devotional works I saw at once that I could make no headway. Such were Aunt Jael's beloved "Thoughts on the Apocalypse" and a row of funereally-bound tomes devoted to the exposition of prophecy. Laid sideways on the bottom shelf was that musty fusty giant, our celebrated copy of the "Trowsers Bible." I liked Matthew Henry's great Commentary in three huge black volumes, with the dates at the top of every page, from which I learnt that this world was made in the year B.C. 4004 (six thousand years ago: a brief poor moment lost in the facing-both-ways Eternity that haunted me), and that Christ was born four years Before Christ. Certain books demolishing the Darbyites or Close Brethren and their fellow-sinners at the other pole of Error pleased me by their hairsplitting arguments and vituperative abuse. Then there was "Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners" by Master John Bunyan.

* * * * * * *

The record of this period of my life is perforce wearisome and undramatic. There are no events. More than ever my real life was inside me, was make-believe; that is, real. Change of residence was but a change of stage. The same comedy-tragedy—ME—was for ever on the boards. Not that the change of stage meant nothing. Houses, rooms, weathers, smells, all affected and were somehow a part of my thoughts. The two towns, I knew, were intimately mixed up with my feelings about all that had happened to me in them. Torribridge was the more romantic: little white town made magical by the word-sorcery of Westward Ho! Quay that harboured brown-sailed ships from the Indies, memories of the Rose of Torribridge and that salmon-coloured hostelry called by her name; then Number One, house of gold and murder and mystery. Tawborough was more real. Graced by no Rose of Torridge, she held instead the rose of merchandise. The busy, countrified, unimaginably English character of her market and her streets seemed to make her more genuine, more actual—the right word eludes me—than Torribridge: Torribridge, that eight months' rainbow-circled nightmare, mere invention of Mr. Kingsley and Robbie and Uncle Simeon. Act Three was back in the first setting again; and here, in dining-room, in bed, in attic, the play went on. The principal character was Mary Lee. The audience was Mary Lee. I was player, producer, public all in one.

"Mary," I would say, as soon as I was alone. "Listen, I will tell you what I think."

"Yes, Mary; do!"

This sense of two selves, one of whom could confide in the other, was ever more vivid. Some one else inside me was pleased, surprised, angered, grieved; shared my sorrows and triumphs. Thus it was that in weeping for myself after some cruelty of Aunt Jael's or some more spiritual grief, I felt I was not selfish, because I was sharing trouble with some one else, who lived in the same body. Such impressions are at once too rudimentary and too subtle to be well conveyed in words.

When I called out "Mary," and "I" answered "Yes" the reality of question and answer between two different, though curiously intimate persons, was physical, overwhelming.

Soon after my return to my Grandmother's this sense of dual personality began, in its most physical manifestations, to fade somewhat; in its more spiritual quality, to grow more intense: the first when I began my Diary, the second at the miraculous moment of my Baptism.