"My mother was a beauty. A woman of whom one can say nothing more than that she was a beauty, is misplaced in the home of a man of intellect. One can never cease wondering how it is that such men marry such women; but I believe there are no men so easily ensnared by their own imaginations, or who trouble themselves so little about calculating consequences. They make an ideal, and worship it; and, as your true believers contrive to refresh their motionless saints by new draperies and tinsel, so they go on perpetually investing their idols with fictitious attributes, to encourage and sustain their devotions. But that sort of self-imposition can not last very long; and the best possible recipe for stripping the idol of its false glitter is to marry it! My father made this discovery in due time. He found that beauty without enthusiasm or intellect is even less satisfying than a picture, which is, at least, suggestive, and leaves something to the imagination. There was no sympathy between them. She existed only in company, which, from the languor of her nature, she hardly seemed to enjoy. Change, and variety, and the flutter of new faces were as necessary to her as they were wearisome to him; and so gradually and imperceptibly the distance widened between them, and his whole affections were concentrated on me. This may in some measure account for the formation of my character. I was neither weakened nor benefited by maternal tenderness; and my studies and habits, shaped and regulated by my father, imparted to me a strength and earnestness which--now that they avail me nothing--may speak of as existing in the past.
"It is nearly ten years since my mother died; she went out as a flower dies, drooping slowly, and retaining something of its sweetness to the end. My father outlived her several years. That was the happiest period of my life. There was not a break in the love that bound us together. But there came a struggle at last between us--a struggle in which that love was bitterly tried and tested on both sides.
"I made a deity to myself, as most young people do, especially when they are flattered into the belief that they are more _spirituelle_ and capable of judging for themselves, than the rest of the world. It was a girlish fancy; all girls have such fancies, and look back upon them afterward as they look back upon their dreams, trying to collect and put together forms and colors that fade rapidly in the daylight of experience.