her mind, and that she never really mastered the theory of exchanges or
the nature of rent.

It was her misfortune that the mental atmosphere which surrounded her
during these years of adolescence was almost entirely feminine. No
father, no brother, was there to break in upon the gentle monotony of
the daily round with impetuosity, with rudeness, with careless laughter
and wafts of freedom from the outside world. The Princess was never
called by a voice that was loud and growling; never felt, as a matter
of course, a hard rough cheek on her own soft one; never climbed a wall
with a boy. The visits to Claremont--delicious little escapes into male
society--came to an end when she was eleven years old and Prince Leopold
left England to be King of the Belgians. She loved him still; he was
still "il mio secondo padre or, rather, solo padre, for he is indeed
like my real father, as I have none;" but his fatherliness now came to
her dimly and indirectly, through the cold channel of correspondence.
Henceforward female duty, female elegance, female enthusiasm, hemmed
her completely in; and her spirit, amid the enclosing folds, was hardly
reached by those two great influences, without which no growing life can
truly prosper--humour and imagination. The Baroness Lehzen--for she had
been raised to that rank in the Hanoverian nobility by George IV before
he died--was the real centre of the Princess's world. When Feodora
married, when Uncle Leopold went to Belgium, the Baroness was left
without a competitor. The Princess gave her mother her dutiful regards;
but Lehzen had her heart. The voluble, shrewd daughter of the pastor
in Hanover, lavishing her devotion on her royal charge, had reaped her
reward in an unbounded confidence and a passionate adoration. The girl
would have gone through fire for her "PRECIOUS Lehzen," the "best and
truest friend," she declared, that she had had since her birth. Her
journal, begun when she was thirteen, where she registered day by day