January 7, 1865: This was nothing like the England she'd imagined.
Memory is a liar.
It can hide truths in fantasies, make the misery of one time appear to be the happiness of another. It mutes faces, words, sounds, and sights. It covers everything in a delicate lace that softens the harshest of realities. Take, for example, the morning of January 7, 1865, when Sara Crewe first arrived at the Select Seminary for Young Ladies...
Memory will tell Sara that, on that morning, the rising sun was filtering through the lilac fog, and the seminary's pale stone rose up in the distance like something out of Tennyson. In truth, there was no sunshine through the icy rain. The fog was not a pastoral lilac, but an industrial yellow, and the seminary was no castle, but a fortress. Sara looked out of the window of the smart carriage her father had rented for the journey and found herself to shocked by the sight of row homes and factories and turning gyres. This was nothing like the England she'd imagined.
Page 15 of A Secret Princess, by Margaret Stohl and Melissa de la Cruz