for her.

"It was not till late in my life that I became acquainted with the
deep interior sacrifice, the constant self-abnegation, which all
her life involved. She was born with a strong, vehement, impulsive
nature,--a nature both proud and sensitive,--a nature whose tastes
were passions, whose likings and whose aversions were of the most
intense and positive character. Devoted as she always seemed to
the mere practical and material, she had naturally a deep romance
and enthusiasm of temperament which exceeded all that can be
written in novels. It was chiefly owing to this that a home and a
central affection of her own were never hers. In her early days of
attractiveness, none who would have sought her could meet the high
requirements of her ideality; she never saw her hero, and so never
married. Family cares, the tending of young children, she often
confessed, were peculiarly irksome to her. She had the head of a
student, a passionate love for the world of books. A Protestant
convent, where she might devote herself without interruption to
study, was her ideal of happiness. She had, too, the keenest
appreciation of poetry, of music, of painting, and of natural
scenery. Her enjoyment in any of these things was intensely vivid
whenever, by chance, a stray sunbeam of the kind darted across the
dusty path of her life; yet in all these her life was a constant
repression. The eagerness with which she would listen to any account
from those more fortunate ones who had known these things, showed
how ardent a passion was constantly held in check. A short time before
her death, talking with a friend who had visited Switzerland, she
said, with great feeling: 'All my life my desire to visit the
beautiful places of this earth has been so intense, that I cannot
but hope that after my death I shall be permitted to go and look at
them.'

"The completeness of her self-discipline may be gathered from the fact
that no child could ever be brought to believe she had not a natural
fondness for children, or that she found the care of them burdensome.
It was easy to see that she had naturally all those particular habits,
those minute pertinacities in respect to her daily movements and the
arrangement of all her belongings, which would make the meddling,
intrusive demands of infancy and childhood peculiarly hard for her to
meet. Yet never was there a pair of toddling feet that did not make
free with Aunt Esther's room, never a curly head th