Womanhood

Beautiful Edith Hastings. Eight years of delicate nurture, tender
care and perfect health have ripened her into a maiden of wondrous
beauty, and far and near the people talk of the blind man's ward,
the pride and glory of Collingwood. Neither pains nor money, nor
yet severe discipline, have been spared by Richard Harrington to
make her what she is, and while her imperious temper has bent to
the one, her intellect and manners have expanded and improved
beneath this influence of the other, and Richard has not only a
plaything and pet in the little girl he took from obscurity, but
also a companion and equal, capable of entering with him the mazy
labyrinths of science, and astonishing him with the wealth of her
richly stored mind. Still, in everything pertaining to her
womanhood she is wholly feminine and simple-hearted as a child.

Now, as of old, she bounds through the spacious grounds of
Collingwood, trips over the grassy lawn, dances up the stairs, and
fills the once gloomy old place with a world of melody and
sunlight. Edith knows that she is beautiful! old Rachel has told
her so a thousand times, while Victor, the admiring valet, tells
her so every day, taking to himself no little credit for having
taught her, as he thinks, something of Parisian manners. Many are
the conversations she holds with him in his mother tongue, for she
has learned to speak that language with a fluency and readiness
which astonished her teachers and sometimes astonished herself. It
did not seem difficult to her, but rather like an old friend, and
Marie at first was written on every page of Ollendorff.