in manner, as in word and deed.  His natural aptitude had made his other studies easy to him, and his imagination made him quick to grasp these lessons that lay outside the province of the schoolroom.  What a fair flower to tend!  How great are the joys that mothers know!  In those days I began to understand how his own mother had been able to live and to bear her sorrow.  This, sir, was the great event of my life; and now I am coming to the tragedy which drove me hither.

“It is the most ordinary commonplace story imaginable; but to me it meant the most terrible pain.  For some years I had thought of nothing but my child, and how to make a man of him; then, when my son was growing up and about to leave me, I grew afraid of my loneliness.  Love was a necessity of my existence; this need for affection had never been satisfied, and only grew stronger with years.  I was in every way capable of a real attachment; I had been tried and proved.  I knew all that a steadfast love means, the love that delights to find a pleasure in self-sacrifice; in everything I did my first thought would always be for the woman I loved.  In imagination I was fain to dwell on the serene heights far above doubt and uncertainty, where love so fills two beings that happiness flows quietly and evenly into their life, their looks, and words.  Such love is to a life what religion is to the soul; a vital force, a power that enlightens and upholds.  I understood the love of husband and wife in nowise as most people do; for me its full beauty and magnificence began precisely at the point where love perishes in many a household.  I deeply felt the moral grandeur of a life so closely shared by two souls that the trivialities of everyday existence should be powerless against such lasting love as theirs.  But where will the hearts be found whose beats are so nearly isochronous (let the scientific term pass) that they may attain to this beatific union?  If they exist, nature and chance have set them far apart, so that they cannot come together; they find each other too late, or death comes too soon to separate them.  There must be some good reasons for these dispensations of fate, but I have never sought to discover them.  I cannot make a study of my wound, because I suffer too much from it.  Perhaps perfect happiness is a monster which our species should not perpetuate.  There were other causes for my fervent desire for such a marriage as this.  I had no friends, the world for me was a desert.  There is something in me that repels friendship.  More than one person has sought me out, but, in spite of efforts on my part, it came to nothing.  With many men I have been careful to show no sign of something that is called ‘superiority;’ I have adapted my mind to theirs; I have placed myself at their point of view, joined in their laughter, and overlooked their defects; any fame I might have gained, I would have bartered for a little kindly affection.  They parted from me without regret.  If you seek for real feeling