“I am not so sure of that,” said her mother. “We care so much that we can’t think of anything else. We can’t take things calmly as they do. And they have an advantage in it. Frederick is a very good son, but if I were to write to him, ‘I have been ill, and I am better,’ he would be quite satisfied, he would want nothing more. Whereas I want a great deal more,” Mrs. Eastwood said, flicking off with her finger the ghost of a tear which had gathered, in spite of her, in the corner of her eye, and giving a short little broken laugh. The path of fathers and mothers is often strewn with roses, but the roses have very big thorns. Even Nelly, who was young, whose heart leapt forward to a future of her own, in which brothers had but little share, did not here quite comprehend her mother. For her own part, had she been left to herself, it is possible that Frederick’s “I have been ill, but I am better,” would have satisfied all her anxieties; but as the girl by force of sympathy was but half herself and half her mother, she entered into the feelings which she did not altogether share with a warmth which was increased by partisanship, if such a word can be used in such a case. “It is wicked of him not to write more fully,” she said. “No, Nelly, dear, not wicked, only thoughtless; all men are the same,” said Mrs. Eastwood. And to be sure this large generalization affords a little comfort now and then to women, as the same principle does to men in different circumstances; for there is nothing about which the two halves of humanity are so fond of generalizing as each other. It seems to afford a certain consolation that “all men are just the same,” or that “women are like that everywhere”--an explanation which, at least, partially exonerates the immediate offender.