MY SECRET LIFE
would lay on the rug with a pillow, and my back to the light reading, and say it rested me better, to be on the floor, but in hope of seeing her legs as she made cheeses. I often did, and have no doubt now that she meant me to do so, for she would swing round, quite close to my head, so that I could see to her knees, and make her petticoat’s edge as she squatted, just over my head, immediately snatching her petticoats back and saying: “Oh! you’ll see more than is good for you.”
It used to excite me. One day as she did it, and squatted, I put out my hand and pulled her clothes, “she rolled on to her back; threw up her legs quite high, and for a second I saw her thighs; she recovered herself, laughing. “I saw your thighs,” said I. “That you didn’t.” One day she let me put my hand into her bosom; I sniffed. “What’s there to smell?” said she. “I have some idea that she used to watch me closely, when I was with her sister, as she was always looking after her, and before she kissed me, would open the door suddenly or go out of the room, and then return. I’ve seen the other sister; just outside the door of the room, when suddenly opened.
The big sister must have been five feet nine high, and large in proportion; the impression on my mind, is that she was two and twenty: that age dwells in my recollection, and that my mother remarked it. She had brown hair and eyes, I recollect well the features of the woman. Her lower lip was like a cherry, having a distinct cut down the middle, caused she said by the bite of a parrot, which nearly severed her lip when a girl. This feature I recollect more clearly than anything else. My mother remarked that though so big, she was lighter in tread, than anyone in the house, her voice
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