all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified self-respect.  And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in value outweighed the added pain:  it was the stubbornly resistant feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart, when condemnation was loudest:  “I am not what you think me, and your verdict does not change my own self.  You cannot make me vile whatever you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you deem me to be now.”  And the very pride became a shield against degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear to become sullied in my own sight—­and that is a thing not without its use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends, and Society.  So peace to the maiden aunt’s ashes, and to those of her absurd kings, for I owe them something after all.  And I keep grateful memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women.  It is well to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield.  No other experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie between mother and child—­a tie that in our case never relaxed and never weakened.  Though her grief at my change of faith and consequent social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never brought a cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love.  And I look back at her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me in her earthly life.  I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May, 1874.