For the first nine years of her life she had lived the only companion of a very miserable mother.

And all that mother's misery had apparently come from the fact of her having a husband.

Those first years of the child's life had been very sad; very monotonous, very depressing.

Perhaps the effect of them did but confirm the speciality of an idiosyncrasy, which would have been much the same without them.

But, at all events, when the child was brought to the house of her great-aunt, it seemed as if her mind and character had been too long and too uniformly toned to accord with sadness, for happiness to have any power of taking hold of her.
The old Marchesa Lanfredi, who took the young Contessa under her roof, and under her care, was not a bad sort of woman in the main; but she was thoroughly and consistently worldly, and judged everything from a worldly point of view.