Excerpt from A Brave Lady<br><br>She never did. Except at church on Sun days, or driving out along the most unfrequent ed roads, in her handsome old - fashioned car riage, no one saw her beyond the limits of her own grounds. She was as little known as the Dalai Lama, and regarded with almost equal awe. Her smallest deeds were noticed, her lightest saying recorded, and her very name uttered respectfully, as if she were a different person to the rest of the world.<br><br>She was. As I sat gazing at her during the whole of church-time, I felt that I never had seen, never should see, any body like Lady de Bougainville.<br><br>It so happened that hitherto I had known very few women - that 1s, gentlewomen - partly because in the far-away parish where we had lived till we came here, there were only farm houses, except the great house, which my father never let me enter. A certain sad prejudice he had-which I will no further allude to ex cept to say that, though I was motherless, my mother was not dead - made him altogether avoid female society. He had brought me up entirely himself, and more like a boy than a girl: in my heart I wished I was a boy, and rather despised my own sex, until I saw Lady de Bougainville.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.