Preparations for my departure around me must have been going on, but I perceived nothing of them. I vaguely remember daily acquaintance with a dame's school in the neighbourhood, whither Mary Ann conducted me every morning. But remembrance confines itself to the first positive delights of a slate and pencil. Next to my own operas and Mary Ann's stories, I could conceive nothing on earth more fascinating than a certain slate, after I had arduously polished it, a slate-pencil, and leisure to draw what I liked on the blue-grey square. There were little boys and girls on the benches before and behind me, but I only see myself absorbed with my new pleasure, making strokes and curves and letters, and effacing them with impassioned gravity.
A grown-up young lady, with yellow ringlets, in a black-and-white silk dress, paid a visit to my grandmother one day, when I heard myself described as "bold and saucy,"--heaven knows why, since I never uttered a word in that formidable presence, and felt less than a mouse's courage if I but accidentally encountered those severe black eyes. The young lady offered to show me her dolls. I never cared for dolls, and I went without enthusiasm. It was my first glimpse of girlish luxury. The room in which her treasures were kept seemed to me as large as a chamber of the palaces of story. There were trains, carriages, perambulators, about two dozen dolls of all sizes, with gorgeous wardrobes; there were beds, bonnets, parasols, kitchen utensils, dear little cups; babies in long clothes, peasants, dancing-girls, and queens with crowns on their heads and long cloaks. The young girl was one of the many extinguishable flames of my uncle Lionel, destined, like Goethe, to sigh for one, and then another in sentimental freedom, and end in bondage of an execrable kind. She is blurred for me, but that palatial doll's chamber and all those undreamed-of splendours remain still a vivid vision, like the lovely pantomime, whither Dennis took me with his pockets full of oranges to suck between the acts. Oh, that bewildering paradisiacal sight of the fairies! the speechless emotions of the transformation scene! the thirst, the yearning, for short muslin skirts, and limelight, and feet twinkling rapturously in fairyland! The humours of the clown and the harlequin left me cold; for, being acquainted with the extreme tenderness of the human body through harsh experience, I could not understand the pleasure the clown found in continually banging and knocking down the harmless harlequin. Each unprovoked blow left me sadder and more harassed. I felt the old man must be very much hurt, and wondered why the audience seemed to enjoy his repeated discomfiture so hugely. But the fairy dancing was quite different. Here was an untempered joy that did not pass my comprehension. To be a fairy by night, and possess all the young girl's toys by day! This was the dream harshly broken by the appearance of my sisters, themselves demure little fairies in green silk dresses and poky green silk bonnets.