And this she has done with none of the hard, consistent strength and intelligence of your make-believe heroine in a book, so disheartening an example to our faltering impulses for good.  She has been infinitely human and pathetically fallible; she has cried out and hesitated and complained and done the wrong thing and wept and failed and still fought on, till to think of her is, for the weakest of us, like a bugle call to high endeavor.  Nelse is now a better man than his father, and we shut up “Ghosts” with impatience that Ibsen should have selected that story to tell out of all the tales there must have been in the village where he lived.

Now imagine if you can ... for I cannot even faintly indicate to you ... our excitement when Nelse begins to look about him for a wife.  In the first place, we are saved by our enforced closeness to real people from wasting our energies in the profitless outcry of economists that people like Nelse should be prohibited from having children.  It occurs to us that perhaps the handsome fellow’s immense good-humor and generosity are as good inheritance as the selfishness and cold avarice of priggish young Horace Gallatin, who never drinks a drop.  Perhaps at some future date all people who are not perfectly worthy to have children will be kept from it by law.  In Hillsboro, we think, that after such a decree the human race would last just one generation; but that is not the point now.  The question is, will Nelse find a wife who will carry on his mother’s work, or will he not?

If you think you are excited over a serial story because you can’t guess if “Lady Eleanor” really stole the diamonds or not, it is only because you have no idea of what excitement is.  You are in a condition of stagnant lethargy compared to that of Hillsboro over the question whether Nelse will marry Ellen Brownell, “our Ellen,” or Flossie Merton, the ex-factory girl, who came up from Albany to wait at the tavern, and who is said to have a taste for drink herself.

Old Mrs. Perkins, whom everybody had thought sunk in embittered discontent about the poverty and isolation of her last days, roused herself not long ago and gave Ellen her cherished tortoise-shell back-comb, and her pretty white silk shawl to wear to village parties; and racked with rheumatism, as the old woman is, she says she sits up at night to watch the young people go back from choir rehearsal so that she can see which girl Nelse is “beauing home.”  Could the most artfully contrived piece of fiction more blessedly sweep the self-centered complainings of old age into generous and vitalizing interest in the lives of others?