After that, for a time, my grief gave place to rage. The punishment was so much greater than the crime that my heart cried out against its injustice. Had I stayed down in the depths where I was I should have accepted it phlegmatically; but having made the effort to rise, and made it with some success.... I acquitted my mother and my sister of any share in the injury done to me. My mother was the tenderest little creature God ever made, but she had always been under the domination of my father, and had now come under that of her sons. Never having asserted herself, she would hardly begin to do it at this date, though she might weep her heart out in secret. I knew my sister would put in a good word for me, but as the youngest of the family and a girl she would easily be overruled. Jack might be mercifully inclined, but he would do as Jerry insisted. Jerry—who as Sir Gerald Melbury would now cut a great swath as head of the family—Jerry would be my father over again. He would be my father over again, only on a smaller scale. My father was tyrannical by instinct; Jerry would be so by imitation. My father believed his word to be law because he didn’t know how to do anything else; Jerry would believe his word to be law in order to be like my father. My father wouldn’t forgive me because I had outraged his affections; Jerry wouldn’t forgive me because my father hadn’t done it first. As far as he could bring it about, my future would be locked and sealed with my father’s death, not because he, Jerry, would be so shocked at my way of life, but because the laws of the Medes and Persians alter not. Nothing remained for me, then, but to grin and bear it, and bide my time. That I had friends of my own was to me a source of that kind of consolation which is largely pride. Cantyre and the Coningsbys, Regina Barry and her mother—came closer to me now than any one with whom I had ties of blood. “Our relatives,” George Sand writes somewhere, “are the friends given us by Nature; our friends are the relatives given us by God.” As relatives given me by God I regarded Lovey and Christian and Colonel Straight and Pyn and Beady Lamont and all that band of humble, helpful pals to whom I was knit in the bonds of the “robust love” which was the atmosphere of brave old Walt Whitman’s City of Friends. There was no pose among them, nor condemnation, nor severity. Forgiveness was exercised there till seventy times seven. They forbore one another in love, and endeavored to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace to a degree of which Some One would have said that He had not found the like, no, not in Israel.