From a very early age, indeed, this false note in Dolly had begun

to make itself heard. While she was yet quite a child, Herminia

noticed with a certain tender but shrinking regret that Dolly

seemed to attach undue importance to the mere upholsteries and

equipages of life,--to rank, wealth, title, servants, carriages,

jewelry. At first, to be sure, Herminia hoped this might prove but

the passing foolishness of childhood: as Dolly grew up, however, it

became clearer each day that the defect was in the grain--that

Dolly's whole mind was incurably and congenitally aristocratic or

snobbish. She had that mean admiration for birth, position,

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adventitious advantages, which is the mark of the beast in the

essentially aristocratic or snobbish nature. She admired people

because they were rich, because they were high-placed, because they

were courted, because they were respected; not because they were

good, because they were wise, because they were noble-natured,

because they were respect-worthy.

But even that was not all. In time, Herminia began to perceive

with still profounder sorrow that Dolly had no spontaneous care or

regard for righteousness. Right and wrong meant to her only what

was usual and the opposite. She seemed incapable of considering

the intrinsic nature of any act in itself apart from the praise or

blame meted out to it by society. In short, she was sunk in the

same ineffable slough of moral darkness as the ordinary inhabitant

of the morass of London.

To Herminia this slow discovery, as it dawned bit by bit upon her,

put the final thorn in her crown of martyrdom. The child on whose

education she had spent so much pains, the child whose success in

the deep things of life was to atone for her own failure, the child

who was born to be the apostle of freedom to her sisters in

darkness, had turned out in the most earnest essentials of

character a complete disappointment, and had ruined the last hope

that bound her to existence.

Bitterer trials remained. Herminia had acted through life to a

great extent with the idea ever consciously present to her mind

that she must answer to Dolly for every act and every feeling. She

had done all she did with a deep sense of responsibility. Now it

loomed by degrees upon her aching heart that Dolly's verdict would

in almost every case be a hostile one. The daughter was growing

old enough to question and criticise her mother's proceedings; she

was beginning to understand that some mysterious difference marked

off her own uncertain position in life from the solid position of

the children who surrounded her--the children born under those

special circumstances which alone the man-made law chooses to stamp

with the seal of its recognition. Dolly's curiosity was shyly

aroused as to her dead father's family. Herminia had done her best

to prepare betimes for this inevitable result by setting before her

child, as soon as she could understand it, the true moral doctrine

as to the duties of parenthood. But Dolly's own development

rendered all such steps futile. There is no more silly and

persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence

to any appreciable extent the moral ideas and impulses of their

children. These things have their springs in the bases of

character: they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot be

altered or affected after birth by the foolishness of preaching.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, you

will find soon enough he will choose his own course for himself and

depart from it.




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