e was in not "breaking her will" when she was a little
child. There was nothing the matter with her, they said, but that she
had been spoiled by indulgence. If they had had the charge of her,
they'd have brought her down. She'd got the upperhand of her father now;
but if he'd only taken hold of her in season! There are people who think
that everything may be done, if the doer, be he educator or physician, be
only called "in season." No doubt,--but in season would often be a
hundred or two years before the child was born; and people never send so
early as that.

The father of Elsie Veneer knew his duties and his difficulties too well
to trouble himself about anything others might think or say. So soon as
he found that he could not govern his child, he gave his life up to
following her and protecting her as far as he could. It was a stern and
terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility, and not without force of
intellect and will, and the manly ambition for himself and his
family-name which belonged to his endowments and his position. Passive
endurance is the hardest trial to persons of such a nature.

What made it still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing
his cross in utter loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He could
not talk of them even with those who knew their secret spring. His
minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner sort
of devotees,--persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for sanctity, and
grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and Elsewhere with the
egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more odious forms of avarice and
self-indulgence. How could he speak with the old physician and the old
black woman about a sorrow and a terror which but to name was to strike
dumb the lips of Consolation?

In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for
which young men and young women go about looking into each other's faces,
with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and making them
beautiful to each other, as to all of us. He had found his other self
early, before he had grown weary in the search and wasted his freshness
in vain longings: the lot of many, perhaps we may say of most, who
infringe the patent of our social order by intruding themselves into a
life already upon half allowance of the necessary luxuries of existence.
The life he had led for a brief space was not only beautiful in outward
circumstance, as