With all this untiring good-nature, with all this resolute industry in the task of making every one happy whom she approached, there was mingled some indescribable influence, which invariably preserved her from the presumption, even of the most presuming people.  I never knew anybody venturesome enough—­either by word or look—­to take a liberty with her.  There was something about her which inspired respect as well as love.  My father, following the bent of his peculiar and favourite ideas, always thought it was the look of her race in her eyes, the ascendancy of her race in her manners.  I believe it to have proceeded from a simpler and a better cause.  There is a goodness of heart, which carries the shield of its purity over the open hand of its kindness:  and that goodness was hers.

To my father, she was more, I believe, than he himself ever imagined—­or will ever know, unless he should lose her.  He was often, in his intercourse with the world, wounded severely enough in his peculiar prejudices and peculiar refinements—­he was always sure to find the first respected, and the last partaken by her. He could trust in her implicitly, he could feel assured that she was not only willing, but able, to share and relieve his domestic troubles and anxieties.  If he had been less fretfully anxious about his eldest son; if he had wisely distrusted from the first his own powers of persuading and reforming, and had allowed Clara to exercise her influence over Ralph more constantly and more completely than he really did, I am persuaded that the long-expected epoch of my brother’s transformation would have really arrived by this time, or even before it.

The strong and deep feelings of my sister’s nature lay far below the surface—­for a woman, too far below it.  Suffering was, for her, silent, secret, long enduring; often almost entirely void of outward vent or development.  I never remember seeing her in tears, except on rare and very serious occasions.  Unless you looked at her narrowly, you would judge her to be little sensitive to ordinary griefs and troubles.  At such times, her eyes only grew dimmer and less animated than usual; the paleness of her complexion became rather more marked; her lips closed and trembled involuntarily—­but this was all:  there was no sighing, no weeping, no speaking even.  And yet she suffered acutely.  The very strength of her emotions was in their silence and their secresy.  I, of all others—­I, guilty of infecting with my anguish the pure heart that loved me—­ought to know this best!

How long I might linger over all that she has done for me! As I now approach nearer and nearer to the pages which are to reveal my fatal story, so I am more and more tempted to delay over those better and purer remembrances of my sister which now occupy my mind.  The first little presents—­innocent girlish presents—­which she secretly sent to me at school; the first sweet days of our uninterrupted intercourse, when the close of my college life restored me to home; her first inestimable sympathies with my first fugitive vanities of embryo authorship, are thronging back fast and fondly on my thoughts, while I now write.