valry
for the possession of him, Vesta felt that the life which was
unconscious there was the fountain of her own, and, loving no man else,
she felt her heart like a goldfish of that fountain, go around and
around it throbbingly.

Then first arose the wish, often in woman's life repeated, to have been
born a man and know how to help her father. That suggested that she had
brothers who ought to be summoned, and confer with their father; but now
it occurred to her that every one of them had leaned upon him; and,
though conscious that it was wicked, Vesta felt her pride rise against
the thought that any being outside of that house, even a brother, should
know of its disgrace.

What could she do? She thought of all her jewels, her riding mare, her
watch, her father's own gifts, and then the thought perished that these
could help him.

Could she not earn something by her voice, which had sung to such
praises? Alas! that voice had lost the ingredient of hope, and she
feared to unclose her lips lest it might come forth in agony, crying,
"God, have mercy!"

"I have nothing," said Vesta to herself; "except love for these two
martyrs, my father and mother. No, nothing can be done until he awakens
and tells me the worst. Meantime it would be wicked for me to increase
the agitation already here, and where I must be the comforter."

CHAPTER VII.

JACK-O'-LANTERN IRON.

Mrs. Custis was in no situation to give annoyance for that day, as a
sick-headache seized her and she kept her room. Infirm of will, purely
social in her marriage relations, and never aiming higher than
respectability, she missed the coarse mark of her husband who, with all
his moral defections, probably was her moral equal, his vital standard
higher, his tone a genial hypocrisy, and at bottom he was a democrat.

Mrs. Custis had no insight nor variability of charity; her mind, bounded
by the municipal republic of Baltimore, which esteems itself the world,
particularly among its mercantile aristocracy, who live like the old
Venetian nobility among their flat lagoons, and do commerce chiefly with
the Turk in the more torrid and instinctive Indies and South. Amiable,
social, afraid of new ideas, frugal of money; if hospitable at the
table, with a certain spiritedness that is seldom intellectual, but a
beauty that powerfully attracts, till, by the limited sympathies beneath
it, the husband from the outer world discerns how hopelessly slavery and
caste s