And so the years went on.  It was a pity that no babies came to soften our hearts, my step-mother’s and mine, and to draw us nearer together as only the presence of children can.  A household without children is always hard and angular, even when surrounded by all the softening influences of refinement and education.  What was ours with its poverty and roughness, its every-day cares and its endless discomforts?  One day was like all the rest, and in their wearying succession they rise up in my memory like ghosts of the past coming to lay their cold, death-like hands on the feebly kindling hopes of the present.  I see myself now, as I look back, a tall, awkward girl of fifteen, with my long, straggling, sunburnt hair, my sallow, yet pimply complexion, my small, weak-looking blue eyes, that every exposure to the sun and wind would redden, and my long, lean hands and arms, that offended my sense of beauty constantly, as I dwelt on their hopelessly angular turns.  I had one beauty; so my little paper-framed glass, that rested on the rough rafter that edged the sloping roof of my garret, told me, whenever I took it down to gaze in it, which, but for that beauty, would have been but seldom.  It was a finely cut and firmly set mouth and chin.  There was, and I felt it, beauty and character in the curves of the lips, in the rounding of the chin; there was even a healthy ruddiness in the lips, and something of delicacy in the even, well-set teeth that showed themselves when they parted.

The gazing at these beauties gave me great pleasure, not for any effect they might ever produce in others,—­what did I know of that?—­but because I had in myself a strong love of the beautiful, a passion for grace of form and brilliancy of color which made doubly distasteful to me our bare, uncouth walls, with their ugly, straight-backed chairs, and their frightfully painted yellow or red tables and chests-of-drawers.

My step-mother’s appearance, too, was a constant offence to my beauty-loving eye,—­with her lank, tall figure, round which clung those narrow skirts of “bit” calico, dingy red or dreary brown,—­her feet shod in the heavy store-shoes which were brought us from Catlettsburg by the returning flat-boat men,—­her sharp-featured face, the forehead and cheeks covered with brown, mouldy-looking spots, the eyes deep-set, with a livid, dyspeptic ring around them, and the lips thin and pinched,—­the whole face shaded by the eternal sun-bonnet, which never left her head from early sunrise till late bedtime (no Sandy woman is ever seen without her sun-bonnet).  All these were perpetual annoyances to me; they made me discontented without knowing why; they filled me with disgust, a disgust which my respect for her good qualities could not overcome.