uded brow and
a warm welcome, she not having the misfortune of being so closely
connected with you as the innocent victim of your previous ill-temper.

I enter into these details, not because they are necessarily connected
with selfishness, for many unselfish, generous-minded people are the
unfortunate victims of ill-temper, to which vice the preceding traits of
character more peculiarly belong; but for the purpose of showing you
that your conduct towards strangers can be no test of your
unselfishness. It is only in the more trying details of daily life that
the existence of the vice or the virtue can be evidenced. It is,
nevertheless, upon qualities so imperceptible to yourself as to require
this close scrutiny that most of the happiness and comfort of domestic
life depends.

You know the story of the watch that had been long out of order, and the
cause of its irregularity not to be discovered. At length, one
watchmaker, more ingenious than the rest, suggested that a magnet might,
by some chance, have touched the mainspring. This was ascertained by
experiment to have been the case; the casual and temporary neighbourhood
of a magnet had deranged the whole complicated machinery: and on equally
imperceptible, often undiscoverable, trifles does the healthy movement
of the mainspring of domestic happiness depend. Observe, then,
carefully, every irregularity in its motion, and exercise your
ingenuity to discover the cause in good time; the derangement may
otherwise soon become incurable, both by the strengthening of your own
habits, and the dispositions towards you which they will impress on the
minds of others.

Do let me entreat you, then, to watch yourself during the course of even
this one day,--first, for the purpose of ascertaining whether my
accusation of selfishness is or is not well founded, and afterwards, for
the purpose of seeking to eradicate from your character every taint of
so unlovely, and, for the credit of the sex, I may add, so unfeminine a
failing.

Before we proceed further on this subject, I must attempt to lay down a
definition of selfishness, lest you should suppose that I am so mistaken
as to confound with the vice above named that self-love, which is at
once an allowable instinct and a positive duty.

Selfishness, then, I consider as a perversion of the natural and
divinely-impressed instinct of self-love. It is a desire for things
which are not really good for us, followed by an endeavour to