Mrs. More is devoured by care. She sits with a clouded brow in her elegant, well-regulated house; and when you talk with her, you are surprised to learn that everything in it is in the most dreadful disorder from one end to the other. You ask for particulars, and find that the disorder has relation to exquisite standards of the ways of doing things, derived from observation of life in the most subdivided state of European service,--to all of which she has not as yet been able to raise her domestics. You compliment her on her cook, and she responds, in plaintive accents, “She can do a few things decently, but she is nothing of a cook.” You refer with enthusiasm to her bread, her coffee, her muffins and hot rolls, and she listens and sighs. “Yes,” she admits, “these are eatable,--not bad; but you should have seen the rolls at a certain _café_ in Paris, and the bread at a certain nobleman’s in England, where they had a bakery in the castle, and a French baker, who did nothing all the while but to refine and perfect the idea of bread. When she thinks of these things, everything in comparison is so coarse and rough!--but then she has learned to be comfortable.” Thus, in every department of housekeeping, to this too well-instructed person, “Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise.” Not a thing in her wide and apparently beautifully kept establishment is ever done well enough to elicit from her more than a sigh of toleration. “I suppose it must do,” she faintly breathes, when pool human nature, having tried and tried again, evidently has got to the boundaries of its capabilities; “you may let it go, Jane; I never expect to be suited.” The poor woman, in the midst of possessions and attainments which excite the envy of her neighbors, is utterly restless and wretched, and feels herself always baffled and unsuccessful. Her exacting nature makes her dissatisfied with herself in everything that she undertakes, and equally dissatisfied with others. In the whole family there is little of that pleasure which comes from the consciousness of mutual admiration and esteem, because each one is pitched to so exquisite a tone that each is afraid to touch another for fear of making discord. They are afraid of each other everywhere. They cannot sing to each other, play to each other, write to each other; they cannot even converse together with any freedom, because each knows that the others are so dismally well informed and critically instructed.