But even that was not all. In time, Herminia began to perceive with still profounder sorrow that Dolly had no spontaneous care or regard for righteousness. Right and wrong meant to her only what was usual and the opposite. She seemed incapable of considering the intrinsic nature of any act in itself apart from the praise or blame meted out to it by society. In short, she was sunk in the same ineffable slough of moral darkness as the ordinary inhabitant of the morass of London.
To Herminia this slow discovery, as it dawned bit by bit upon her, put the final thorn in her crown of martyrdom. The child on whose education she had spent so much pains, the child whose success in the deep things of life was to atone for her own failure, the child who was born to be the apostle of freedom to her sisters in darkness, had turned out in the most earnest essentials of character a complete disappointment, and had ruined the last hope that bound her to existence.
Bitterer trials remained. Herminia had acted through life to a great extent with the idea ever consciously present to her mind that she must answer to Dolly for every act and every feeling. She had done all she did with a deep sense of responsibility. Now it loomed by degrees upon her aching heart that Dolly’s verdict would in almost every case be a hostile one. The daughter was growing old enough to question and criticise her mother’s proceedings; she was beginning to understand that some mysterious difference marked off her own uncertain position in life from the solid position of the children who surrounded her—the children born under those special circumstances which alone the man-made law chooses to stamp with the seal of its recognition. Dolly’s curiosity was shyly aroused as to her dead father’s family. Herminia had done her best to prepare betimes for this inevitable result by setting before her child, as soon as she could understand it, the true moral doctrine as to the duties of parenthood. But Dolly’s own development rendered all such steps futile. There is no more silly and persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence to any appreciable extent the moral ideas and impulses of their children. These things have their springs in the bases of character: they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot be altered or affected after birth by the foolishness of preaching. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, you will find soon enough he will choose his own course for himself and depart from it.