None of the peculiar developments of the female nature have a more exquisite vitality than the sentiment of a frail, delicate, repressed, timid woman, for a strong, manly, generous son. There is her ideal expressed; there is the outspeaking and outacting of all she trembles to think, yet burns to say or do; here is the hero that shall speak for her, the heart into which she has poured hers, and that shall give to her tremulous and hidden aspirations a strong and victorious expression. “I have gotten a _man_ from the Lord,” she says to herself, and each outburst of his manliness, his vigor, his self-confidence, his superb vitality, fills her with a strange, wondering pleasure, and she has a secret tenderness and pride even in his wilfulness and waywardness.... First love of womanhood is something wonderful and mysterious,—but in this second love it rises again, idealized and refined; she loves the father and herself united and made one in this young heir of life and hope. * * * * * [Sidenote: Mothers’ inconsiderateness.] But even mothers who have married for love themselves somehow so blend a daughter’s existence with their own as to conceive that she must marry their love and not her own. * * * * * [Sidenote: Repression.] Her large brown eyes had an eager joy in them when Mary entered; but they seemed to calm down again, and she received her only with that placid, sincere air which was her habit. Everything about this woman showed an ardent soul, repressed by timidity and by a certain dumbness in the faculties of outward expression; but her eyes had, at times, that earnest, appealing language which is so pathetic in the silence of inferior animals. One sometimes sees such eyes, and wonders whether the story they intimate will ever be spoken in mortal language. * * * * * [Sidenote: Woman’s instinctive silence.] Ah, that silence! Do not listen to hear whom a woman praises, to know where her heart is! do not ask for whom she expresses the most earnest enthusiasm! but if there be one she once knew well whose name she never speaks,—if she seems to have an instinct to avoid every occasion of its mention,—if when you speak, she drops into silence and changes the subject,—why, look there for something! just so, when going through deep meadow-grass, a bird flies ostentatiously up before you, you may know her nest is not there, but far off, under distant tufts of fern and buttercup, through which she has crept with a silent flutter in her spotted breast, to act her pretty little falsehood before you. * * * * * [Sidenote: Idle talk.] When Mrs. Twitchel began to talk, it flowed a steady stream, as when one turns a faucet, that never ceases running till some hand turns it back again. * * * * * [Sidenote: Reverence the basis of faith.]