Publisher's Synopsis
In a remote wing of the house, in barren, ill-kept rooms, the poor infants of the dead ladyhad struggled through their brief lives, and given them up, one after the other. Sir Jeoffryhad not wished to see them, nor had he done so, but upon the rarest occasions, and thennearly always by some untoward accident. The six who had died, even their mother hadscarcely wept for; her weeping had been that they should have been fated to come into theworld, and when they went out of it she knew she need not mourn their going asuntimely. The two who had not perished, she had regarded sadly day by day, seeing theyhad no beauty and that their faces promised none. Naught but great beauty would haveexcused their existence in their father's eyes, as beauty might have helped them to goodmatches which would have rid him of them. But 'twas the sad ill fortune of the childrenAnne and Barbara to have been treated by Nature in a way but niggardly. They were paleyoung misses, with insignificant faces and snub noses, resembling an aunt who died aspinster, as they themselves seemed most likely to. Sir Jeoffry could not bear the sight ofthem, and they fled at the sound of his footsteps, if it so happened that by chance theyheard it, huddling together in corners, and slinking behind doors or anything big enough tohide them. They had no playthings and no companions and no pleasures but such as theinnocent invention of childhood contrives for itself.After their mother's death a youth desolate and strange indeed lay before them. A spinsterwho was a poor relation was the only person of respectable breeding who ever came nearthem. To save herself from genteel starvation, she had offered herself for the place ofgoverness to them, though she was fitted for the position neither by education norcharacter. Mistress Margery Wimpole was a poor, dull creature, having no wilful harm inher, but endowed with neither dignity nor wit. She lived in fear of Sir Jeoffry, and in fear ofthe servants, who knew full well that she was an humble dependant, and treated her asone. She hid away with her pupils in the bare school-room in the west wing, and taughtthem to spell and write and work samplers. She herself knew no more.