Not that her father had been so recklessly dense as to try his drugs on her; he knew too much for that.

But your doctor's children oft get an unusual bringing up, and the chances in favor of the extraordinary in that behalf are doubled where there is only one child.
Mother Marklin had been an invalid from the babyhood of Bess.

Father Marklin, in those intervals when his brougham was not racing from one languid, dyspeptic, dance-tired, dinner-weary, rout-exhausted woman to another at ten dollars a drooping head, looked after Bess in that spirit of argus-eyed solicitude with which a government looks after its crown jewels.

Bess was herded, not to say hived, and her childish days were days of captivity.

She was prisoner to her father's loving apprehensions, he being afraid to have her out of sight.
Then came her father's death, and the Marklin household devolved upon Bess's hands when the hands were new and small and weak; and the load served to emphasize Bess in divers ways.