I did not remember our parents , who had died in my babyhood . Hester was fifteen years older than I , and she had always seemed more like a mother than a sister . She had been very good to me and had never denied me anything I wanted , save the one thing that mattered . I was twenty-five before I ever had a lover . This was not , I think , because I was more unattractive than other women . The Merediths had always been the `` big '' family of Newbridge . The rest of the people looked up to us , because we were the granddaughters of old Squire Meredith . The Newbridge young men would have thought it no use to try to woo a Meredith . I had not a great deal of family pride , as perhaps I should be ashamed to confess . I found our exalted position very lonely , and cared more for the simple joys of friendship and companionship which other girls had . But Hester possessed it in a double measure ; she never allowed me to associate on a level of equality with the young people of Newbridge . We must be very nice and kind and affable to them -- noblesse oblige , as it were -- but we must never forget that we were Merediths . When I was twenty-five , Hugh Blair came to Newbridge , having bought a farm near the village . He was a stranger , from Lower Carmody , and so was not imbued with any preconceptions of Meredith superiority . In his eyes I was just a girl like others -- a girl to be wooed and won by any man of clean life and honest heart . I met him at a little Sunday-School picnic over at Avonlea , which I attended because of my class . I thought him very handsome and manly . He talked to me a great deal , and at last he drove me home . The next Sunday evening he walked up from church with me . Hester was away , or , of course , this would never have happened .
She had gone XXXXX a month 's visit to distant friends .
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