f the young that come after me, and must be
careful over their lovely dignities and fair duties, I yet make haste
to assert that the old people, who make it hard for the young people to
do right, may be twice as much to blame as those whom they arraign for
a concealment whose very heart is the dread of their known selfishness,
fierceness, and injustice. If children have to obey their parents or
guardians, those parents and guardians are over them in the name of
God, and they must look to it: if in the name of God they act the
devil, that will not prove a light thing for their answer. The causing
of the little ones to offend hangs a fearful woe about the neck of the
causer. It were a hard, as well as a needless task, seeing there is One
who judges, to set forth how far the child is to blame as toward the
parent, where the parent first of all is utterly wrong, yea out of true
relation, toward the child. Not, therefore, is the child free;
obligation remains--modified, it may be, but how difficult, alas, to
fulfill! And, whether Letty and such as act like her are _excusable_ or
not in keeping attentions paid them a secret, this sorrow for the good
ones of them certainly remains, that, next to a crime, a secret is the
heaviest as well as the most awkward of burdens to carry. It has to be
carried always, and all about. From morning to night it hurts in
tenderest parts, and from night to morning hurts everywhere. At any
expense, let there be openness. Take courage, my child, and speak out.
Dare to speak, I say, and that will give you strength to resist, should
disobedience become a duty. Letty's first false step was here: she said
to herself _I can not_, and did not. She lacked courage--a want in her
case not much to be wondered at, but much to be deplored, for courage
of the true sort is just as needful to the character of a woman as of a
man. Had she spoken, she might have heard true things of Tom,
sufficient so to alter her opinion of him as, at this early stage of
their intercourse, to alter the _set_ of her feelings, which now was
straight for him. It may be such an exercise of courage would have
rendered the troubles that were now to follow unnecessary to her
development. For lack of it, she went about from that time with the
haunting consciousness that she was one who might be found out; that
she was guilty of what would go a good way to justify the hard words
she had so resented. Already the secret had begun to work cons