The whole family had in some degree that foible which affects people who lead isolated lives; they come to think that they are the only people who have their virtues; they exaggerate these, and they conceive a kindness even for the qualities which are not their virtues.  Mrs. Mavering’s life was secluded again from the family seclusion, and their peculiarities were intensified in her.  Besides, she had some very marked peculiarities of her own, and these were also intensified by the solitude to which she was necessarily left so much.  She meditated a great deal upon the character of her children, and she liked to analyse and censure it both in her own mind and openly in their presence.  She was very trenchant and definite in these estimates of them; she liked to ticket them, and then ticket them anew.  She explored their ancestral history on both sides for the origin of their traits, and there were times when she reduced them in formula to mere congeries of inherited characteristics.  If Eunice was self-willed and despotic, she was just like her grandmother Mavering; if Minnie was all sentiment and gentle stubbornness, it was because two aunts of hers, one on either side, were exactly so; if Dan loved pleasure and beauty, and was sinuous and uncertain in so many ways, and yet was so kind and faithful and good, as well as shilly-shallying and undecided, it was because her mother, and her mother’s father, had these qualities in the same combination.

When she took her children to pieces before their faces, she was sharp and admonitory enough with them.  She warned them to what their characters would bring them to if they did not look out; but perhaps because she beheld them so hopelessly the present effect of the accumulated tendencies of the family past, she was tender and forgiving to their actions.  The mother came in there, and superseded the student of heredity:  she found excuse for them in the perversity of circumstance, in the peculiar hardship of the case, in the malignant misbehaviour of others.

As Dan entered, with the precedence his father and sister yielded him as the principal actor in the scene which must follow, she lifted herself vigorously in bed, and propped herself on the elbow of one arm while she stretched the other towards him.

“I’m glad of it, Dan!” she called, at the moment he opened the door, and as he came toward her she continued, with the amazing velocity of utterance peculiar to nervous sufferers of her sex:  “I know all about it, and I don’t blame you a bit!  And I don’t blame her!  Poor helpless young things!  But it’s a perfect mercy it’s all over; it’s the greatest deliverance I ever heard of!  You’d have been eaten up alive.  I saw it, and I knew it from the very first moment, and I’ve lived in fear and trembling for you.  You could have got on well enough if you’d been left to yourselves, but that you couldn’t have been nor hope to be as long as you breathed, from the meddling and the machinations and the malice of that unscrupulous and unconscionable old Cat!”