years dying--n'est-ce
pas?--and am here an old woman, complaining to a young girl. It is
because our recollections of youth are always young: and because I have
suffered so, that I would spare those I love a like grief. Do you know
that the children of those who do not love in marriage seem to bear an
hereditary coldness, and do not love their parents as other children
do? They witness our differences and our indifferences, hear our
recriminations, take one side or the other in our disputes, and are
partisans for father or mother. We force ourselves to be hypocrites, and
hide our wrongs from them; we speak of a bad father with false praises;
we wear feint smiles over our tears, and deceive our children--deceive
them, do we? Even from the exercise of that pious deceit there is no
woman but suffers in the estimation of her sons. They may shield her as
champions against their father's selfishness or cruelty. In this case,
what a war! What a home, where the son sees a tyrant in the father, and
in the mother but a trembling victim! I speak not for myself--whatever
may have been the course of our long wedded life, I have not to complain
of these ignoble storms. But when the family chief neglects his wife,
or prefers another to her, the children too, courtiers as we are, will
desert her. You look incredulous about domestic love. Tenez, my child,
if I may so surmise, I think you cannot have seen it.

Ethel (blushing, and thinking, perhaps, how she esteems her father, how
her mother, and how much they esteem each other). My father and mother
have been most kind to all their children, madame; and no one can say
that their marriage has been otherwise than happy. My mother is the
kindest and most affectionate mother, and--(Here a vision of Sir Brian
alone in his room, and nobody really caring for him so much as
his valet, who loves him to the extent of fifty pounds a year and
perquisites; or, perhaps, Miss Cann, who reads to him, and plays a good
deal of evenings, much to Sir Brian's liking--here this vision, we say,
comes, and stops Miss Ethel's sentence.)

Madame de F. Your father, in his infirmity--and yet he is five years
younger than Colonel Newcome--is happy to have such a wife and such
children. They comfort his age; they cheer his sickness; they confide
their griefs and pleasures to him--is it not so? His closing days are
soothed by their affection.

Ethel. Oh, no, no! And yet it is not his fault or ours that he is a
str