.

FAMILY PRIDE.
I I am afraid that too great a part of this book is about old maids, but it is hard for anyone who knows only the thriving bustling world of today to realise how largely we children were hemmed in and surrounded by a proper phalanx of elderly single ladies and clergymen.

I don't believe that we were any the worse for that, and to such heroines as Miss Jane Maple, Miss Mary Trefusis and old Miss Jessamin Trenchard, I here publicly acknowledge deep and lasting debt-but it did make our life a little monotonous, a little unadventurous, a little circumscribed -and because T am determined to give the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the year of Jeremy's life that I am describing, this book will also, I am afraid, be a little circumscribed, a little unadventurous.
The elderly lady who most thoroughly circumscribed Jeremy was, of course--putting Miss Jones, who was a governess and therefore did not count, aside--Aunt Amy.
Now Aunt Amy was probably the most conceited woman in Polchester.

There is of course ordinary human conceit, of which every living being has his or her share.

I am not speaking of that; Miss Amy Trefusis might be said to be fanatically conceited.
Although she was now a really plain elderly woman it is possible that when she was a little girl she was pretty.