Chapter 9 - Page 2

learned to cling to her. Though I remembered her,
strictly speaking, no more than at first, yet the affection I must
have borne her in my First State seemed to revive in me very easily,
like all other emotions. I was as much at home with Jane, indeed, as
if I had known her for years. And this wasn't strange; for I HAD
known her for years, in point of fact; and and though I'd forgotton
most of those years, the sense of familiarity they had inspired
still lived on with me unconsciously. I know now that memory resides
chiefly in the brain, while the emotions are a wider endowment of
the nervous system in general; so that while a great shock may
obliterate whole tracts in the memory, no power on earth can ever
alter altogether the sentiments and feelings.

As for Jane, she was only too glad to come with me. There were no
lodgers at present, she said; and none expected. Her sister
Elizabeth would take care of the rooms, and if any stranger came,
why, Lizzie'd telegraph down at once for her. So I wrote to Aunt
Emma to expect us both next day. Aunt Emma's, I knew, was a home
where I or mine were always welcome.

Jane had never seen Aunt Emma. There had been feud between the
families while my father lived, so she didn't visit The Grange after
my mother's death. Aunt Emma had often explained to me in part how
all that happened. It was the one point in our family history on
which she'd ever been explicit: for she had a grievance there; and
what woman on earth can ever suppress her grievances? It's our
feminine way to air them before the world, as it's a man's to bury
them deep in his own breast and brood over them.

My mother, she told me, had been a widow when my father married
her--a rich young widow. She had gone away, a mere girl, to
Australia with her first husband, a clergyman, who was lost at sea
two or three years after, on the voyage home to England without her.
She had one little girl by her first husband, but the child died
quite young: and then she married my father, who met her first in
Australia while she waited for news of the clergyman's safety. Her
family always disapproved of the second marriage. My father had no
money, it seemed; and mamma was well off, having means of her own to
start with, like Aunt Emma, and having inherited also her first
husband's property, which was very considerable. He had left it to
his little girl, and after her to his wife; so that first my father,
and then I myself, came in, in the end, to both the little estates,
though my mother's had been settled on the children of the first
marriage. Aunt Emma always thought my father had married for money:
and she said he had been hard and unkind to mamma: not indeed cruel;
he wasn't a cruel man; but severe and