It was only much later that I could at all appreciate what infinite tact must have been requisite on grandmamma’s part, to enable her, the young widow with her little children, to take up exactly the right position towards her stepson, now Duke of Nassau, so little younger than herself. But her innate sense of the fitness of things pointed out to her exactly the right line of conduct, and it was with the most perfect womanly dignity and grace that she settled down at once into the part of the middle-aged, one might say the elderly woman, which she had decided should henceforth be hers. She had a stately way of receiving visitors, nearly always standing, and with the doors on all sides thrown wide open. Even her doctor was accustomed to stand and talk to her, or else would walk up and down with her, hat in hand, through the rooms with their big folding-doors opening one into the other. All this perpetual living on view as it were, this lack of privacy, seemed to us then perfectly natural--one is always inclined to take the difficulties in the lives of others as a matter of course, especially if they themselves accept them unmurmuringly. So that it never even occurred to me how frightfully dull and monotonous was the life grandmamma led--just the same little round of duties and occupations day by day, a drive to the same spot at the same hour, varied only by a little walk while the carriage waited for her, and just the same set of people received in audience over and over again. There could of course never be any pleasure to her in receiving visitors, on account of her deafness, but she never let this interfere with the enjoyment of others, and nothing pleased her so much as to sit, smiling and serene, in the midst of a crowd of gay and laughing young people, whose words she could not hear, but whose bright laughing faces enabled her to share in their mirth. It is in looking back on them now, that such details throw fresh light for me on the inner meaning of that beautiful and serene, yet in reality solitary existence, and I reflect on the amount of silent endurance, the long practice in self-restraint and self-sacrifice, all the disappointments and disenchantments, by which in the end that appearance of placid content, of sweet and smiling resignation, had been acquired.