For a pretty girl, she was surprisingly lacking in vanity about her looks, which she considered to be more a matter of chance than anything else. Or God-given, if you believed that God gave beauty as a gift, which seemed unlikely. It was more like the kind of trick that the Greek gods played on people—a curse rather than a gift. One of the few books Freda had read was an illustrated anthology of Greek myths (A Child’s Guide) that she had found abandoned on the seat in a train carriage when she was ten years old. It was hardly a helpful primer for life.
