Dethroned Author:Mary Seymour Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. HINDRANCES. 'LICE HAMILTON'S mind was even more than usually busy that night after she left her aunt and her father together in the drawin... more »g-room. What a great thing it would have been to be a man, so she was telling herself; a man who could put his foot on the ladder which leads to some great success. This blessing, however, being denied her, why could she not become a famous woman ? There were such now, as there had been in past ages. Not, indeed, Joan of Arc, or even the gentle Florence Nightingale, were often to be repeated in everyday life ; but there were women authors, women painters, who, after plenty of humiliations and failures, became brilliant successes, and wrote books that all the world read, or sent in canvases to the Royal Academy which all the world ran after. Her last waking resolve was that she would do something to surprise Aunt Lucy and society in general, and that no miserable fear of being 'unfeminine' should deter her from this purpose. She, however, had sufficient judgment to feel that a certain amount of self-culture must be the preface to a glorious career, and, with the consciousness that her father was meditating her resuming 'lessons,' she must lose not a day in adopting a regular plan of study, in order to prove that she was independent of teachers. The excitement of her thoughts rendered this girl exceedingly wide awake, and when Aunt Lucy came to pay her a last visit it was to find that sleep and Alice seemed very far apart. ' Don't you think, now the mornings are getting lighter, that seven o'clock is a very good hour to rise ?' she exclaimed, sitting up in bed, with a view to conversation. 'At Miss Wyndham's a great bell always rung us up at seven. We used to grumble awfully'. ' I think,' said Miss Hamilton ca...« less