She was not, as is the general popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost moribund from the cradle.

In early girlhood she was slight and sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous.

She was a good horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years afterwards happened to her when she was riding.

The injury to her spine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to be only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto been attached to it.

Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian.