Emily: Or, the voluptuous delights of a once-innocent young lady

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'You will marry soon', was often said to me at twenty, and so often that I began to think of marriage as a far-off country, or rather an island whereon the inhabitants would be vaguely strange to me-having other manners, other attitudes-and where mirrors (in rooms that I had not visited but knew I must encounter) would reflect different images of me to those with which I was the more familiar. Sometimes I thought of marriage as a chair, a high chair, high with a straight back, and having ornaments of pearls and plumes, and having crested arms, in which I would forever sit.

Such curious fancies often took me then, and still possess me of many other things, of customs, attitudes, and fancies eaten as one eats a small, sweet cake. When I was young, was very young, in my eleventh year and still in bud, an old lady stopped me close by Shotter's Wood into which a meadow rises and disappears as if it had loped forward in a long, green wave and then had changed its mind, not wishing to disturb the saplings as they were then, long ago. 'Are there dreams to be had here, dear, my little dear?' she asked of me.

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