This
latter personage had contracted several real or imaginary disorders
and absorbed her own soul, with all its most tender attributes, in her
constant demand and need for a sympathy and solicitude which were
nowhere to be found. Her husband had retired by degrees into the
exclusive refuge of his scientific and literary pursuits, and lived as
effectually apart from the woman he had married, as far as friendly
intercourse and mutual confidence were concerned, as though they were
strangers.
And yet, whenever Mrs. Hampden found herself well enough to go out, my
father accompanied her with the most amiable urbanity; thus, from time
to time, they appeared among the gay coterie to which they always
belonged in name, looking as happy and contented as most husbands and
wives do, who, for half a dozen years or so, have been trying one
another's patience with more or less success.
Thus by a strange unfitness of things, will one unheeded uncared-for
little life drift out by itself into an open sea of dangers and
difficulties, with nothing more wholesome to distract it during the
long lonely hours of many successive days, as they come and go, than
its own morbid tendencies.
Necessarily, this abnormal growth of an impressionable young soul,
began to speak for itself, in accents which would have caught the
ready, willing ear of an attentive parent, had mine been such. In my
twelfth year I was as much a woman as I am to-day, matured and
hardened by an experience that would have blighted a more yielding and
less obdurate spirit.
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