The earliest love of the tiny maiden belongs almost always to her own father, who is in truth her first beloved. One can often hear it from the child's lips, "You know, Papa, when Mama dies then I will marry you." That is in the childish sense meant quite properly and literally. The early, premature death of the mother gives reality to such infantile wishes, at least as far as concerns the care of the house. As soon then as Maria may begin to play this part, she fills it in a striking and inimitable fashion, although in years she is yet a mere child. She is altogether the mother in the care of a boy outside the family and this, as he quite rightly remarked, laughing boisterously and heartily, even where it is not necessary. Thus her first thought, when she spends her first night banished from home, is of "the poor father, who must go to bed without the little services to which he is so accustomed." She possesses a maturity in the management of the household which few elders have. Everything goes on and is done without any one noticing that it is being done. "Is there anything more charming than this sixteen year old little house mother in her housekeeping activities?" says one of her admirers. "Just look, let her do what she will, she accomplishes it in the best way and at the same time most beautifully." She is quite contented in the position which she has made. Her eroticism seems completely satisfied. "She is psychically yet so little a woman that there is not the least sexual inclination in the charm that infuses her and therefore her bodily development is overlooked. There is also no trace yet of that entrancing shyness which springs from the mere suspicion that there must be something else about the man." A friend of the family expresses it thus: "When one considers the repose, the self possession of her nature, the freedom from constraint and the spirituality of it, one might almost believe that _she was not originally of this earth but perhaps a native of the moon, which seems to exercise more influence upon her than the earth_." Every trace of dreamy maiden phantasies, which represent nothing but unconscious love desires, was wanting in her. What she formerly possessed of these was now completely bound with her care of the father.