Agnes Grey | Page 3

castles: but, with the
elasticity of youth, I soon recovered the shook.
Though riches had charms, poverty had no terrors for an inexperienced girl like me.
Indeed, to say the truth, there was something exhilarating in the idea of being driven to
straits, and thrown upon our own resources. I only wished papa, mamma, and Mary were
all of the same mind as myself; and then, instead of lamenting past calamities we might
all cheerfully set to work to remedy them; and the greater the difficulties, the harder our
present privations, the greater should be our cheerfulness to endure the latter, and our
vigour to contend against the former.
Mary did not lament, but she brooded continually over the misfortune, and sank into a
state of dejection from which no effort of mine could rouse her. I could not possibly bring
her to regard the matter on its bright side as I did: and indeed I was so fearful of being
charged with childish frivolity, or stupid insensibility, that I carefully kept most of my
bright ideas and cheering notions to myself; well knowing they could not be appreciated.
My mother thought only of consoling my father, and paying our debts and retrenching
our expenditure by every available means; but my father was completely overwhelmed
by the calamity: health, strength, and spirits sank beneath the blow, and he never wholly
recovered them. In vain my mother strove to cheer him, by appealing to his piety, to his
courage, to his affection for herself and us. That very affection was his greatest torment:
it was for our sakes he had so ardently longed to increase his fortune--it was our interest
that had lent such brightness to his hopes, and that imparted such bitterness to his present
distress. He now tormented himself with remorse at having neglected my mother's advice;
which would at least have saved him from the additional burden of debt--he vainly
reproached himself for having brought her from the dignity, the ease, the luxury of her
former station to toil with him through the cares and toils of poverty. It was gall and
wormwood to his soul to see that splendid, highly- accomplished woman, once so courted
and admired, transformed into an active managing housewife, with hands and head
continually occupied with household labours and household economy. The very
willingness with which she performed these duties, the cheerfulness with which she bore
her reverses, and the kindness which withheld her from imputing the smallest blame to
him, were all perverted by this ingenious self-tormentor into further aggravations of his
sufferings. And thus the mind preyed upon the body, and disordered the system of the
nerves, and they in turn increased the troubles of the mind, till by action and reaction his
health was seriously impaired; and not one of us could convince him that the aspect of
our affairs was not half so gloomy, so utterly hopeless, as his morbid imagination
represented it to be.
The useful pony phaeton was sold, together with the stout, well-fed pony--the old
favourite that we had fully determined should end its days in peace, and never pass from
our hands; the little coach- house and stable were let; the servant boy, and the more
efficient (being the more expensive) of the two maid-servants, were dismissed. Our
clothes were mended, turned, and darned to the utmost verge of decency; our food,
always plain, was now simplified to an unprecedented degree--except my father's
favourite dishes; our coals and candles were painfully economized--the pair of candles

reduced to one, and that most sparingly used; the coals carefully husbanded in the
half-empty grate: especially when my father was out on his parish duties, or confined to
bed through illness--then we sat with our feet on the fender, scraping the perishing
embers together from time to time, and occasionally adding a slight scattering of the dust
and fragments of coal, just to keep them alive. As for our carpets, they in time were worn
threadbare, and patched and darned even to a greater extent than our garments. To save
the expense of a gardener, Mary and I undertook to keep the garden in order; and all the
cooking and household work that could not easily be managed by one servant- girl, was
done by my mother and sister, with a little occasional help from me: only a little, because,
though a woman in my own estimation, I was still a child in theirs; and my mother, like
most active, managing women, was not gifted with very active daughters: for this
reason--that being so clever and diligent herself, she was never tempted to trust her
affairs to a deputy, but, on the contrary, was willing to act and think for others as well as
for number one; and whatever was