Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/41

Rh so much as her dear friend my mother; so that my father only found consolation (for he would not go out nor meet anybody in the intensity of his grief) in talking to my mother of his lost wife. From sympathy came pity, from pity grew love, and three years after Isabel's death my mother and my father were married. They had eleven children, great and small; I mean that some only lived to be baptized and died, some lived a few years, and some grew up.

To continue my own small life, I can remember distinctly everything that has happened to me from the age of three. I do not know whether I was pretty or not; there is a very sweet miniature of me with golden hair and large blue eyes, and clad in a white muslin frock and gathering flowers, painted by one of the best miniature painters of 1836, when miniatures were in vogue and photographs unknown. My mother said I was "lovely," and my father said I was "all there"; but I am told my uncles and aunts used to put my mother in a rage by telling her how ugly I was. My father adored me, and spoilt me absurdly; he considered me an original, a bit of "perfect nature." My mother was equally fond of me, but severe—all her spoiling, on principle, went to her step-son, whose name was Theodore.

When my father and mother were first married, James Everard Arundell, my father's first cousin, and my godfather, was the then Lord Arundell of Wardour. He was reputed to be the handsomest peer of the day, and he was married to a sister of the Duke of