Children nurse passions as strong as ours, but so much interrupted by playfulness that it is impossible to measure their exact strength.  Lydia’s ‘amour propre’ was wounded in an incurable manner by that revelation of her own peculiarity.  Certain incidents of her American life recurred to her, which she comprehended more clearly.  She recalled the portrait of her grandmother, the complexion, the hands, the hair of her father, and she experienced that shame of her birth and of her family much more common with children than our optimism imagines.  Parents of humble origin give their sons a liberal education, expose them to the demoralization which it brings with it in their positions, and what social hatreds date from the moment when the boy of twelve blushes in secret at the condition of his relatives!  With Lydia, so instinctively jealous and untruthful, those first wounds induced falsehood and jealousy.  The slightest superiority even, noticed in one of her companions, became to her a cause for suffering, and she undertook to compensate by personal triumphs the difference of blood, which, once discovered, wounds a vain nature.  In order to assure herself those triumphs she tried to win all the persons who approached her, mistresses and comrades, and she began to practise that continued comedy of attitude and of sentiment to which the fatal desire to please, so quickly leads-that charming and dangerous tendency which borders much less on goodness than falseness.  At eighteen, submitted to a sort of continual cabotinage, Lydia was, beneath the most attractive exterior, a being profoundly, though unconsciously, wicked, capable of very little affection—­she loved no one truly but her brother—­open to the invasion of the passions of hatred which are the natural products of proud and false minds.  It was one of these passions, the most fatal of all, which marriage was to develop within her—­envy.

That hideous vice, one of those which govern the world, has been so little studied by moralists, as all too dishonorable for the heart of man, no doubt, that this statement may appear improbable.  Madame Maitland, for years, had been envious of her husband, but envious as one of the rivals of an artist would be, envious as one pretty woman is of another, as one banker is of his opponent, as a politician of his adversary, with the fierce, implacable envy which writhes with physical pain in the face of success, which is transported with a sensual joy in the face of disaster.  It is a great mistake to limit the ravages of that guilty passion to the domain of professional emulation.  When it is deep, it does not alone attack the qualities of the person, but the person himself, and it was thus that Lydia envied Lincoln.  Perhaps the analysis of this sentiment, very subtle in its ugliness, will explain to some a few of the antipathies against which they have struck in their relatives.  For it is not only between husband and wife that these unavowed