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THE SECRET GARDEN
Frances Hodgson Burnett
CHAPTER I
THERE IS NO ONE LEFT
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor
to live with her uncle everybody said she was
the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.
It was true, too.
She had a little thin face and a little thin body,
thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair
was yellow, and her face was yellow because she
had been born in
India and had always been ill in one way or another.
Her father had held a position under the English
Government and had always been busy and ill himself,
and her mother had been a great beauty who cared
only
to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people.
She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when
Mary was born she handed her over to the care
of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if
she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep
the child out of sight as much as possible. So
when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby
she was kept out of the way, and when she became
a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept
out of the way also. She never remembered seeing
familiarly
anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the
other native servants, and as they always obeyed
her and gave her her own way in everything, because
the Mem Sahib
would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying,
by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical
and selfish a little pig as ever lived. The young
English governess who came to teach her to read
and write disliked her so much that she gave up
her place in three months,
and when other governesses came to try to fill
it they always went away in a shorter time than
the first one.
So if Mary had not chosen to really want to know
how to read books she would never have learned
her letters at all.
One frightfully hot morning, when she was about
nine years old, she awakened feeling very cross,
and she became crosser still when she saw that
the servant who stood by her bedside was not her
Ayah.
"Why did you come?" she said to the
strange woman.
"I will not let you stay. Send my Ayah to
me."
The woman looked frightened, but she only stammered
that the Ayah could not come and when Mary threw
herself into a passion and beat and kicked her,
she looked only
more frightened and repeated that it was not possible
for the Ayah to come to Missie Sahib.
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