My mother reproached me, and pleaded and wept. The weakness of her poor heart, God rest her, was very visible at this time. She clung to me and held me to her, imploring me, as her only child, to consider how lonely she was, how sadly she stood in need of a protector, how good it would be for us both to have Mr. Stanford to watch over us! I broke away from her with a wet scarlet face and heaving bosom, and told her that if Mr. Stanford took my father’s place I would cease to love or even to think of her as my mother. We both cried bitterly, and raised our voices and talked together as most women would at such a moment, not knowing what each other said. I do not condemn myself. I look back and hold that I was right to stand up for the memory of my beloved father, even to rage as I did against my mother’s resolution to marry Mr. Stanford. I wondered at her; indeed, I was shocked. I was young and ardent and romantic, had a girl’s notions of the loyalty of love and the obligations of keeping sacred the memory and the place of one who had been faithful and tender, who had nobly done his duty to his wife and child. CHAPTER III HER MOTHER DIES At the age of seventeen I considered myself qualified to form a judgment of men, and I was amazed and indeed disgusted that my mother should see anything in Mr. Stanford to please her. He and my father were at the opposite ends of the sex, as far removed as the bows from the stern of a ship. He was a spare and narrow man, pale as veal, in complexion sandy, the expression of his countenance hard and acid, his eyes large and moist and the larger and moister for the magnifying spectacles he wore. But my mother would have her way, and a week after she had given me the news of the doctor’s offer they were privately married. My life from this date was one of constant and secret unhappiness. I could never answer Mr. Stanford with any approach to civility without a violent effort. He strove at first to make friends with me, then gave up and took no more heed of me than had I been a shadow at the table or about the house. Yet, sometimes, I would make him pretty rudely and severely feel that he was an intruder, an abomination in my sight, a scandalous illustration of my mother’s weakness of nature; and that was if ever he opened his lips about my father. I never suffered him to mention my father’s name in my presence. He might be about to speak intending to praise, designing every manner of civility toward the memory of the dead; I minded him not; if he named my father I insulted him, and on two or three occasions forced him to quit the table, so strong and fiery was the injurious language I plied him with. My mother wept, threatened to swoon, did swoon once, and our home promised to become as wretched and clamorous as a lunatic asylum.