Excerpt from Rita: An Autobiography My dear mother was not a wise woman. She wanted energy to master the position of our affairs, and to try and better them and tact to gain an influence over her husband. I never saw her out of temper in my life and she was sore ly tried. But upon the other hand tears and reproaches from a sofa were the least available arguments for a man of my father's temperament, who, after a night's dissipation, rose up ready as a lion to run his course. And that course was often fatal to domestic unity. My mother lay on the sofa, and mended our clothes; receiving the few fine ladies who still, for the sake of old acquaintance, took the trouble, when they came to Paris, of climbing up four pair of stairs to see that poor Mrs. Percival, with a courtly grace that would not have ill-fitted some royal lady conferring the hon ors of the tabouret on her distinguished visitors in the old palace yonder. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com 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.