You smile. I
have been nearly fifty years dying--n'est-ce pas?--and am here an old
woman, complaining to a young girl. It is because our recollections of
youth are always young: and because I have suffered so, that I would
spare those I love a like grief. Do you know that the children of those
who do not love in marriage seem to bear an hereditary coldness, and do
not love their parents as other children do? They witness our differences
and our indifferences, hear our recriminations, take one side or the
other in our disputes, and are partisans for father or mother. We force
ourselves to be hypocrites, and hide our wrongs from them; we speak of a
bad father with false praises; we wear feint smiles over our tears, and
deceive our children--deceive them, do we? Even from the exercise of that
pious deceit there is no woman but suffers in the estimation of her sons.
They may shield her as champions against their father's selfishness or
cruelty. In this case, what a war! What a home, where the son sees a
tyrant in the father, and in the mother but a trembling victim! I speak
not for myself--whatever may have been the course of our long wedded
life, I have not to complain of these ignoble storms.
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