Girlhood of Anne Brangwen

When Anna was nine years old, Brangwen sent her to the dames'
school in Cossethay. There she went, flipping and dancing in her
inconsequential fashion, doing very much as she liked,
disconcerting old Miss Coates by her indifference to
respectability and by her lack of reverence. Anna only laughed
at Miss Coates, liked her, and patronized her in superb,
childish fashion.

The girl was at once shy and wild. She had a curious contempt
for ordinary people, a benevolent superiority. She was very shy,
and tortured with misery when people did not like her. On the
other hand, she cared very little for anybody save her mother,
whom she still rather resentfully worshipped, and her father,
whom she loved and patronized, but upon whom she depended. These
two, her mother and father, held her still in fee. But she was
free of other people, towards whom, on the whole, she took the
benevolent attitude. She deeply hated ugliness or intrusion or
arrogance, however. As a child, she was as proud and shadowy as
a tiger, and as aloof. She could confer favours, but, save from
her mother and father, she could receive none. She hated people
who came too near to her. Like a wild thing, she wanted her
distance. She mistrusted intimacy.

In Cossethay and Ilkeston she was always an alien. She had
plenty of acquaintances, but no friends. Very few people whom
she met were significant to her. They seemed part of a herd,
undistinguished. She did not take people very seriously.

She had two brothers, Tom, dark-haired, small, volatile, whom
she was intimately related to but whom she never mingled with,
and Fred, fair and responsive, whom she adored but did not
consider as a real, separate thing. She was too much the centre
of her own universe, too little aware of anything outside.