Of course Laura was a fool--nobody claims for her that she was not; but fools are not rare, either male or female; as they arrange the world and its ways in great measure, it is odd that they do not understand one another better, and whether Laura showed her folly most or least in thinking that she could have been obscurely happy as the wife of a man who belonged to a different class of life from her own (she herself having small intellectual endowments, and but little culture), is a subject too vast, too overwhelming, for decision here; it ought to have a treatise in twelve volumes all to itself. Mrs. Melcombe had come home also somewhat improved, but a good deal disappointed. She had fully hoped and intended to marry again, because her son, who was to live to be old, would wish to marry early, and her future daughter-in-law would be mistress of the house. It was desirable, therefore, that Peter's mother should not be dependent on him for a home. She had twice been invited, while on the Continent, to change her name; but in each case it would have been, in a worldly point of view, very much to her disadvantage, and that was a species of second marriage that she by no means contemplated. She did not want her second husband to take her that she might nurse him in his old age, fast approaching, and that he might live upon her income. So she came home _Mrs. Melcombe_, and she continued to be kind to Laura, though she did not sympathize with her; and that was no fault of hers: sympathy is much more an intellectual than a moral endowment. However kind, dull, and stupid people may be, they can rarely sympathize with any trouble unless they have gone through one just like it themselves. You may hear it said, "Ah, I can sympathize with him, poor fellow, for I have a wooden leg myself," or, "Yes, being a widow, I know what a widow's feelings are," and so on.