Some days elapsed, and it appeared she was not likely to take much of a fancy to anybody in the house. She was not exactly naughty or wilful¹: she was far from disobedient; but an object less conducive² to comfort — to tranquillity³ even — than she presented, it was scarcely possible to have before one’s eyes. She moped: no grown person could have performed that uncheering business better; no furrowed⁴ face of adult exile, longing⁵ for Europe at Europe’s antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of home sickness than did her infant visage. She seemed growing old and unearthly. I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive⁶ imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited, but haunted.

And again, when of moonlight nights, on waking, I beheld⁷ her figure, white and conspicuous⁸ in its night-dress, kneeling upright in bed, and praying like some Catholic or Methodist enthusiast⁹ — some precocious¹⁰ fanatic¹¹ or untimely saint — I scarcely know what thoughts I had; but they ran risk of being hardly more rational and healthy than that child’s mind must have been.

I seldom caught a word of her prayers, for they were whispered low: sometimes, indeed, they were not whispered at all, but put up unuttered; such rare sentences as reached my ear still bore the burden, “Papa; my dear papa!” This, I perceived, was a one-idea’d nature; betraying that monomaniac tendency I have ever thought the most unfortunate with which man or woman can be cursed.

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