The start, I think I know too well. It is the first of my mistakes.
I imagiable, slick with blood. The blood is my mothers. There is too much of it. There is so much of it, I think it runs, like ink. I think, to save the boards beh, the women have set down a bowls; and so the silences between my mothers cries are filled—drip drop! drip drop!—with what might be the staggered beating of clocks. Beyond the beat e other, fainter cries: the shrieks of lunatics, the shouts and scolds of nurses. For this is a madhouse. My mother is mad. The table has straps upon it to keep her from plunging to the floor; arap separates her jaws, to prevent the biting of her tongue; another keeps apart her legs, so that I might emerge from between them. When I am born, the straps remain: the women fear she will tear me in two! They put me upon her bosom and my mouth finds out her breast. I suck, and the
house falls silent about me. There is only, still, that falling blood— drip drop! drip, drop!—the beat telling off the first few minutes of my life, the last of hers. For soon, the clocks run slow. My mothers bosom rises, falls, rises again; then sinks for ever.
I feel it, and suck harder. Then the women pluck me from her. And when I weep, they hit me.
I pass my first ten years a daughter to the nurses of the house. I believe they love me. There is a tabby cat upon the wards, and I think they keep me, rather as they keep that cat, a thing to pet and dress with ribbons. I wear a slate-grey gown cut like their oron and a cap; they give me a belt with a ring of miniature keys upon it, and call me little nurse. I sleep with each of them in turn, in their own beds, and follow them in their duties upon the madhouse wards. The house is a large one—seems larger to me, I suppose—and divided in two: one side for female lunatics, one side for male. I see only the female. I never mind them. Some of them kiss a me, as the nurses do. Some of them touch my hair and weep. I remind them of their daughters. Others are troublesome, and these I am enced to stand before and strike with a wooden wand, cut to my hand, until the nurses laugh and say they never saw anything so droll.
Thus I learn the rudiments of discipline and order; and ially apprehend the attitudes of insanity. This will all prove useful, later.
When I am old enough to reason I am given a g said to be my fathers, the portrait of a lady called my mother, and uand I am an orphan; but, never having knoarents love—or rather, having known the favours of a score of mothers—I am not greatly troubled by the news. I think the nurses clothe and feed me, for my own sake. I am a plain-faced child but, in that childless world, pass for a beauty. I have a sweet singing void an eye for letters. I I suppose I shall live out all my days a nurse, tentedly teasing lunatitil I die.
So we believe, at nine and ten. Some time in my eleventh year, I am summoo the nurses parlour by the matron of the house. I imagine she means to make me some treat. I am wrong. Instead, she
greets me strangely, and will not meet my eye. There is a person with her—a gentleman, she says—but then, the word means little to me. It will mean more, in time. Step closer, the matron says. The gentleman watches. He wears a suit of black, and a pair of black silk gloves. He holds a e with an ivory knob, upon which he leans, the better to study me. His hair is black tending to white, his cheek cadaverous, his eyes i