"How, untrue? You are fond of Miss Keeldar, are you not, my dear?"
"Very fond of Shirley: I both like and admire her: but I am painfully circumstanced: for a reason I cannot explain, I want to go away from this place, and to forget it."
"You told me before you wished to be a governess; but, my dear, if you remember, I did not encourage the idea. I have been a governess myself great part of my life. In Miss Keeldar's acquaintance, I esteem myself most fortunate: her talents and her really sweet disposition have rendered my office easy to me; but when I was young, before I married, my trials were severe, poignant. I should not like a. I should not like you to endure similar ones. It was my lot to enter a family of considerable pretensions to good birth and mental superiority, and the members of which also believed that 'on them was perceptible' an unusual endowment of the 'Christian graces:' that all their hearts were regenerate, and their spirits in a peculiar state of discipline. I was early given to understand, that 'as I was not their equal,' so I could not expect 'to have their sympathy.' It was in no sort concealed from me that I was held 'a burden and a restraint in society.' The gentlemen, I found, regarded me as 'a tabooed woman,' to whom 'they were interdicted from granting the usual privileges
