"All my daughters are
a credit to their husbands; but I mean that you shall be the most
brilliant woman in the Antilles."
The immediate consequences of Rachael's superior education were two: her
girl friends ceased to interest her, and ambitions developed in her
strong imaginative brain. In those days women so rarely distinguished
themselves individually that it is doubtful if Rachael had ever heard of
the phenomenon, and the sum of her worldly aspirations was a wealthy and
intellectual husband who would take her to live and to shine at foreign
courts. Her nature was too sweet and her mind too serious for egoism or
the pettier vanities, but she hardly could help being conscious of the
energy of her brain; and if she had passed through childhood in
ignorance of her beauty, she barely had entered her teens when her happy
indifference was dispelled; for the young planters besieged her gates.
Girls mature very early in the tropics, and at fourteen Rachael Fawcett
was the unresponsive toast from Basseterre to Sandy Point. Her height
was considerable, and she had the round supple figure of a girl who has
lived the out-door life in moderation; full of strength and grace, and
no exaggeration of muscle.
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