Which, indeed, to say truth, was not desirable. Let the mother's deficiencies be what they might, it would have been difficult, I think, to suggest improvement in the child.
She had all the Mortomley regularity of features, light brown hair, flecked with gold, that came likewise from her father's family; but her eyes were the eyes of Dolly--only darker, larger, more liquid; and her vivacity, her peals of delighted laughter, her happy ability to amuse herself for hours together, came from some forgotten Gerace. There are families in which few traditions are preserved, who have left no memory behind them, but still lived long enough to bequeath the great gift of contentment to some who were to come after.
Why then was Lenore accounted an offence? A sentence from "Imperfect Sympathies," may, perhaps, explain this better than I can.
Elia says, "I have been trying all my life to like--" For the present purpose it is not needful to extract more closely,--"And am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me, and in truth I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it."
In a foot note to the same essay, he puts his idea even more clearly:
"There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting (who never saw one another before), and instantly fighting."
Custom, association, family prejudices, the objects upon which the eye has been in the habit of perpetually dwelling, these things go to make the something, which in at once a wider and a narrower sense than that artists and literati understand the word, is called taste.
I mean this: matters such as those indicated, educate for good or for evil, the outward senses, and at the same time form an actual, if unconscious, mental standard to which, as it may be high or low, the estimate of those with whom we are thrown in contact is dwarfed or raised.
If it were true, as is generally supposed, that maternity makes women appreciative of, and tender-hearted to, the children of other women, Lenore might have spanned the gulf which stretched between her mother and the admirable matrons who contemned without understanding her; but it is not true.