would save me from the void in which my
whole life sinks. I did not mean to say this;
but father, you remember the last time we
conversed in this room?"

He had been so wholly unprepared for
what he heard now, that it was with
difficulty he answered, "Yes, Louisa."

"What has risen to my lips now, would
have risen to my lips then, if you had given
me a moment's help. I don't reproach you,
father. What you have never nurtured in
me, you have never nurtured in yourself;
but O! if you had only done so long ago, or
if you had only neglected me, what a much
better and happier creature I should
have been this day!"

On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed
his head upon his hand and groaned aloud.

"Father, if you had known, when we were
last together here, what even I feared while I
strove against it—as it has been my task from
infancy to strive against every natural prompting
that has arisen in my heart; if you had
known that there lingered in my breast,
sensibilities, affections, weaknesses capable of
being cherished into strength, defying all the
calculations ever made by man, and no more
known to his arithmetic than his Creator is
—would you have given me to the husband
whom I am now sure that I hate?"

He said, "No. No, my poor child."

"Would you have doomed me, at any time,
to the frost and blight that have hardened
and spoiled me? Would you have robbed
me—for no one's enrichment—only for the
greater desolation of this world—of the
immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer
of my belief, my refuge from what is
sordid and bad in the real things around me,
my school in which I should have learned to
be more humble and more trusting with
them, and to hope in my little sphere to make
them better?"

"O no, no. No, Louisa."

"Yet father, if I had been stone blind; if I
had groped my way by my sense of touch,
and had been free, while I knew the shapes
and surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy
somewhat, in regard to them; I should have
been a million times wiser, happier, more
loving, more contented, more innocent and
human in all good respects, than I am with
the eyes I have. Now, hear what I have
come to say."

He moved, to support her with his arm.
She rising as he did so, they stood close
together: she with a hand upon his shoulder,
looking fixedly in his face.

"With a hunger and thirst upon me, father,
which have never been for a moment appeased;
with an ardent impulse towards some region
where rules, and figures, and definitions were
not quite absolute; I have grown up, battling
every inch of my way."

"I never knew you were unhappy, my child."

"Father, I always knew it. In this strife
I have almost repulsed and crushed my better
angel into a demon. What I have learned
has left me doubting, misbelieving, despising,
regretting, what I have not learned; and
my dismal resource has been to think that
life would soon go by, and that nothing in it
could be worth the pain and trouble of a
contest."

"And you so young, Louisa!" he said with pity.

"And I so young. In this condition, father
—for I show you now, without fear or favor,
the ordinary deadened state of my mind as I
know it—you proposed my husband to me. I
took him. I never made a pretence to him
or you that I loved him. I knew, and, father,
you knew, and he knew, that I never did. I
was not wholly indifferent, for I had a hope of
being pleasant and useful to Tom. I made
that wild escape into something visionary,
and have gradually found out how wild it
was. But Tom had been the subject of all
the little imaginative tenderness of my life;
perhaps he became so because I knew so
well how to pity him. It matters little now,
except as it may dispose you to think more
leniently of his errors."

As her father held her in his arm, she put
her other hand upon his other shoulder, and
still looking fixedly in his face, went on.

"When I was irrevocably married, there rose
up into rebellion against the tie, the old strife,
made fiercer by all those causes of disparity
which arise out of our two individual natures,
and which no general laws shall ever rule or
state for me, father, until they shall be able
to direct the anatomist where to strike his
knife into the secrets of my soul."

"Louisa!" he said, and said imploringly;
for he well remembered what had passed
between them in their former interview.

"I do not reproach you, father, I make no
complaint. I am here with another object."

"What can I do, child? Ask me what you will."

"I am coming to it. Father, chance then
threw into my way a new acquaintance; a
man such as I had had no experience of;
used to the world; light, polished, easy;
making no pretences; avowing the low estimate
of everything, that I was half afraid to to
form in secrete; conveying to me almost
immediately, though I don't know how or by what
degrees, that he understood me, and read my
thoughts. I could not find that he was worse
than I. There seemed to be a near affinity
between us. I only wondered it should be
worth his while, who cared for nothing else,
to care so much for me."

"For you, Louisa!"

Her father might instictively have
loosened his hold, but that he felt her
strength departing from her, and saw a wild
dilating fire in the eyes steadfastly regarding
him.

"I say nothing of his plea for claiming my
confidence. It matters very little how he
gained it. Father, he did gain it. What you