The scorpion

slander were alien to her. She saw things with a sharp eye, but saw them from a set viewpoint. According to her tale, Myra had even as a child exhibited a peculiar propensity to lying and stealing. In school she was considered stupid and lazy. As a young girl, she had run around with a remarkable woman, a fashionably dressed sharper, with a decidedly masculine manner. Misled, perhaps, by this friend, she had stolen her father’s silver service and pawned it. After a fit of downright insanity during which she tried to strangle her aunt, who had been the motherless child’s faithful guardian, she was dispatched to her Uncle George in a small town. There she stole everything not nailed down, very skillfully forced her uncle’s desk and, appropriating a large sum of money, fled. Her father, a mental man of a most sensitive nature, did not long survive this news: he died of a stroke. Myra’s mother had died in giving her life. “Luckily,” as Uncle George was wont to say bitterly. But Myra did not share his opinion. She had a fantastic notion of what a mother is, and believed that her own mother’s premature death was the cause of all the misfortunes in her life. For my part, I cannot say which view is correct. Certain it is, that Myra’s childhood would not have been as dismal and joyless as under Aunt Emily’s bony fingers; at the same time, even the gentlest of mothers’ hands could not have saved her from the bitterest struggles of her life. And when I recall the latter, I understand Uncle George’s “luckily” quite well. Doubtless he had a clearer picture of his sister than Myra could possibly have had. Little Myra was not to go to school; her father, Franz Rudloff himself ordered it so. He had an almost morbid fear of anything that suggested “the common people.” It seemed to him as if his cool, high-ceilinged home would be contaminated with the exhalations of poorly ventilated class-rooms, as if his quiet walls would re-echo to hundreds of shrill voices, to hundreds of trampling feet, were he to send his daughter to school. So a governess came to the house. Aunt Emily was in secret opposition from the first. She had gone to school, and school had not harmed her in any way. Quite the contrary.