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 would fain pass by it, that the gin-shop, like a devil-fish, sends forth long tentacles and ruthlessly sucks him in; with the mother-whale, when her wilful young one insists on swimming up the fiord, and she who has risked her life to warn him must hear the thud of the harpoon in his side; with the old tired horse, when they fetch him in from his sober reverie in the fields, and put his blinkers on; with anything else?—­yes, with the bluebells, whose life above ground is so short, when wasteful children tread them down;—­these all feel something that one would fain save them from.  So perhaps does the rose-tree also, when some careless boy goes by whooping in the joy of his heart, and whips off her buds with his cane.

Fruitful sympathy must doubtless have some likeness of nature, and also a certain kindliness to found itself on; but it comes more from a penetrative keenness of observation, from the patient investigations of thought, from those vivid intuitions that wait on imagination, from a good memory, which can live over again in circumstances that are changed, and from that intelligent possession of the whole of one’s foregone life, which makes it impossible to ignore the power of any great emotion or passion merely because it is past.  Where these qualities are there should be, for there can be, sympathy.