"'Don't ever again read such trash as this,' she cried in a rage. 'Have you any more of them?'
"'No,' I said, fearing to tell the truth, lest the rest of the books meet the same fate.
"She then sent me on an errand. As I left the house I felt uneasy, thinking that my lie might be discovered. The moment I returned, I saw by the expression on my mother's face that my fears had been realised. The storm broke at once.
"'Oh, what an unfortunate woman I am!' she cried, 'to be treated thus by my own flesh and blood, by the child that I brought into the world with so much pain and suffering. O, God, what have I done to deserve this? O God, what have I done to be cursed with such a child?--so young, yet so full of lies. What will become of her? Have I not always done my duty by her and tried to raise her the best I knew how? Why did she not die when a baby? I like a fool, toiled and moiled for her night and day and this is my reward.'
"I had heard these expressions often, for my mother was a hysterical woman in whom the slightest thing would cause the most violent emotions which demanded relief in such lamentations. And yet, frequent as they were, they never failed to arouse in me feelings of shame and rage--shame that I had caused my mother suffering, and rage that she reproached herself for having brought me into the world. That expression of hers never failed to make me wish that I had never been born--born into this miserable world where I had to toil as a child, and could not go to dances or even read without receiving a torrent of abuse and an avalanche of blows. What harm had I done by my reading? True, I had not heard my mother calling, but how often had I spoken to her without being heard, when she was engrossed in some newspaper or book!
"So I remained quiet, when my mother railed at me for my lie, too ashamed and bitter to make defense or reply. This silence, as usual, made my mother still more angry and she shouted: 'You ungrateful wretch, I'll tell your father, and he'll fix you so you won't feel like lying to your mother for some time to come.'
"That threat nearly paralysed me with dread, for my father was to me a strange man whom I had always feared; my mother, when she wanted to subdue me, only needed to say: 'I'll tell your father.' I remembered the last time my father had whipped me. I was a big girl at the time, more than fourteen years old, and working down town. I had to rise very early in the morning, and it often happened that I would fall asleep again after my mother had called me. On that particular morning mother had more difficulty than usual in arousing me, scolding me severely, and I replied rather impudently, I suppose. She waited till I had got out of bed and was standing in my bare arms and shoulders over the wash bowl, and then she told father, who came with a long leather strap, which I knew well, as it was kept only for one purpose, and beat me so severely that I carried the marks for a long time. The strap was about two inches broad, and with this in one hand, whilst he held me firmly with the other, he belaboured me in such a way that the end of the strap curled cunningly around my neck and under my arms and about my little breast, making big welts which swelled at once to about a fourth of an inch in diameter and were for a few days a most beautiful vivid scarlet in colour. Then they toned down and new and milder tints came, and finally there was only a dull sort of green and blue effect. Finally even these disappeared from my body, but not from me.