Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/66

 she did as she pleased with them all, including her horse-faced brothers, whom she named after the three bears of the fairy-tale. She began life with the dominating spirit of privileged youth, and it carried her far.

Her mother's death, when she was only fifteen, had an abnormal effect on her. It put a shadow permanently into the background of her mind, established a peculiar tragic hinterland of thought into which Jane Shore retires at her most lively moments, unaccountably, with an air of almost cynical detachment when you would least expect it. But that came later. As the immediate result of her mother's death she was sent away from home, to the Misses Leslie's Select Boarding-school for Young Ladies. There she remained for three years, chiefly distinguishing herself as a leader in various dormitory escapades and in the school's amateur theatricals, in which she generally played male parts with a deep voice and a gallant stride. Her success in organizing mischief ended by the Misses Leslie demanding, with firm politeness, that her father take her home. And her success in the school theatricals gave her the idea of going on the stage. When her father received her, disgraced, in his library, she turned the flank of his wrath at her expulsion—characteristically—by announcing that she was done with school, anyway, that she was going to be an actress.

He sat grasping the arms of his library chair,