are the ropes that will save me.
I am telling you this so that you might appreciate the forces that work upon me, making me what I am.
Next day, I am kept to my two bleak rooms and made to sew. I forget my terrors of the darkness of the night, then. My gloves make me clumsy, the needle pricks my fingers. ''I shan''t do it!'' I cry,
tearing the cloth. Then Mrs Stiles beats me. My gown and corset being so stiff, she hurts her palm in the striking of my back. I take what little consolation I might, from that.
I am beaten often, I believe, in my first days there. How could it be otherwise? I have known lively habits, the clamour of the wards, the dotings of twenty women; now the hush and regularity of my uncle''s house drives me to fits and foaming tempers. I am an amiable child, I think, made wilful by restraint. I dash cups and saucers from the table to the floor. I lie and kick my legs until the boots fly from my heels. I scream until my throat bleeds. My passions are met with punishments, each fiercer than the last. I am bound about the wrists and mouth. I am shut into lonely rooms, or into cupboards. One time—having overturned a candle and let the flame lap at the fringes of a chair until they smoke—I am taken by Mr Way into the park and carried, along a lonely path, to the ice-house. I don''t remember, now, the chill of the place; I remember the blocks of grey ice—I should have supposed them clear, like crystal—that tick in the wintry silence, like so many clocks. They tick for three hours. When Mrs Stiles comes to release me I have made myself a kind of nest and cannot be uncurled, and am as weak as if they had drugged me.