My maternal grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and somewhat feared also, in the childish days.  He belonged to a decayed Irish family, the Maurices, and in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife as light-hearted as himself, he had merrily run through what remained to him in the way of fortune.  In his old age, with abundant snow-white hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the lightest provocation, stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased.  My mother was the second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint memory of whom came through my mother’s childhood into mine, and had its moulding effect on both our characters.  This maiden aunt was, as are most Irish folk of decayed families, very proud of her family tree with its roots in the inevitable “kings.”  Her particular kings were the “seven kings of France”—­the “Milesian kings”—­and the tree grew up a parchment, in all its impressive majesty, over the mantelpiece of their descendant’s modest drawing-room.  This heraldic monster was regarded with deep respect by child Emily, a respect in no wise deserved, I venture to suppose, by the disreputable royalties of whom she was a fortunately distant twig.  Chased out of France, doubtless for cause shown, they had come over the sea to Ireland, and there continued their reckless plundering lives.  But so strangely turns the wheel of time that these ill-doing and barbarous scamps became a kind of moral thermometer in the home of the gentle Irish lady in the early half of the present century.  For my mother has told me that when she had committed some act of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, “Emily, your conduct is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France.”  And Emily, with her sweet grey Irish eyes and her curling masses of raven black hair, would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some vague idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their disreputable majesties.

Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised over her a power that made her shrink from aught that was unworthy, petty or mean.  To her the lightest breath of dishonour was to be avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into me, her only daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of shame or merited disgrace.  To the world always a brave front was to be kept, and a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour never.  A gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face.  I have often thought that the training in this reticence and pride of honour was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from