Record of a Girlhood Author:Fanny Kemble 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: william. Took leave of my friends for some months, I am sorry to say; took Mr. home in our carriage and set him down just at day-dawn. It was past four o'c... more »lock before I saw my bed; and the life I am leading is really enough to kill any one. Thursday, June 23rd.—Quite unwell, and in bed all day. Mrs. Jameson came and sat with me some time. We talked of marriage, and a woman's chance of happiness in giving her life into another's keeping. I said I thought if one did not expect too much one might secure a reasonably fair amount of happiness, though of course the risk one ran was immense. I never shall forget the expression of her face ; it was momentary, and passed away almost immediately, but it has haunted me ever since. Great Russell Street. Dear Lady Dacre, I am commissioned by my mother to request your kind permission to bring my brother to your evening party on Saturday; she hopes you will have no scruple in refusing this request, if for any reason you would rather not comply with it. ... I have been thinking much about what you said to me both viva voce and in your note upon that "obnoxious word " in my play. Let me entreat you to put aside conventional regards of age and sex, which have nothing to do with works of art or literature, and view the subject without any of those considerations, which have their own proper domain, doubtless—although I think you have in this instance admitted their jurisdiction out of it. ... I hope aslong as I live that I shall never write anything offensive to decency or morality, or their pure source, religion ; and I hope in my own manners and conversation always to preserve the decorum prescribed by society, good taste, and good feeling; but as a dramatic writer, supposing I am ever to be one, I shall have to depict men as ...« less