Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood)
[Illustration] MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF (From Childhood to Girlhood) TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY MARY J. SAFFORD PREFACE THE SOUL OF A LITTLE GIRL Marie Bashkirtseff, beginning at twelve years old, wrote her journal ingenuously, sincerely, amusing us by her whims, thrilling us by her
day in the Rhodesian Mounted Police, didn't he?" Which was in point of
fact quite accurate.
But I am forgetting that all this time I have not even now introduced my
witch to you.
Hilda Wade, when I first saw her, was one of the prettiest, cheeriest,
and most graceful girls I have ever met--a dusky blonde, brown-eyed,
brown-haired, with a creamy, waxen whiteness of skin that was yet warm
and peach-downy. And I wish to insist from the outset upon the plain
fact that there was nothing uncanny about her. In spite of her singular
faculty of insight, which sometimes seemed to illogical people almost
weird or eerie, she was in the main a bright, well-educated, sensible,
winsome, lawn-tennis-playing English girl. Her vivacious spirits rose
superior to her surroundings, which were often sad enough. But she
was above all things wholesome, unaffected, and sparkling--a gleam of
sunshine. She laid no claim to supernatural powers; she held no dealings
with familiar spirits; she was simply a girl of strong personal charm,
endowed with an astounding memory and a rare measure of feminine
intuition. Her memory, she told me, she shared with her father and all
her father's family; they were famous for their prodigious faculty in
that respect. Her impulsive temperament and quick instincts, on the
other hand, descended to her, she thought, from her mother and her Welsh
ancestry.
Externally, she seemed thus at first sight little more than the ordinary
[Illustration] MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF (From Childhood to Girlhood) TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY MARY J. SAFFORD PREFACE THE SOUL OF A LITTLE GIRL Marie Bashkirtseff, beginning at twelve years old, wrote her journal ingenuously, sincerely, amusing us by her whims, thrilling us by her