t be humbly happy and poor--not even a
plumber!

This form of human sorrow--certainly one of the worst--is not half
enough pitied by the happy.

Of course Laura was a fool--nobody claims for her that she was not; but
fools are not rare, either male or female; as they arrange the world and
its ways in great measure, it is odd that they do not understand one
another better, and whether Laura showed her folly most or least in
thinking that she could have been obscurely happy as the wife of a man
who belonged to a different class of life from her own (she herself
having small intellectual endowments, and but little culture), is a
subject too vast, too overwhelming, for decision here; it ought to have
a treatise in twelve volumes all to itself.

Mrs. Melcombe had come home also somewhat improved, but a good deal
disappointed. She had fully hoped and intended to marry again, because
her son, who was to live to be old, would wish to marry early, and her
future daughter-in-law would be mistress of the house. It was desirable,
therefore, that Peter's mother should not be dependent on him for a
home. She had twice been invited, while on the Continent, to change her
name; but in each case it would have been, in a worldly point of view,
very much to her disadvantage, and that was a species of second marriage
that she by no means contemplated. She did not want her second husband
to take her that she might nurse him in his old age, fast approaching,
and that he might live upon her income.

So she came home _Mrs. Melcombe_, and she continued to be kind to Laura,
though she did not sympathize with her; and that was no fault of hers:
sympathy is much more an intellectual than a moral endowment. However
kind, dull, and stupid people may be, they can rarely sympathize with
any trouble unless they have gone through one just like it themselves.

You may hear it said, "Ah, I can sympathize with him, poor fellow, for I
have a wooden leg myself," or, "Yes, being a widow, I know what a
widow's feelings are," and so on.

No one has a right to blame these people; they are as kind as any; it is
not their fault that some are living among them to whom no experience at
all is necessary, and who not only could sympathize, but do in thought,
with the very angel that never fell, when they consider what it must be
to him if the mortal child he has to watch goes wrong; with the poor
weak drunkard who wishes he could keep sober, but feels, when he wo