I have been thinking a good deal, and seriously, since we last met, about the subject of our conversation, which though a painful one is not to be timidly avoided. The degree of unhappiness in your little household, which ought to be one of the pleasantest of households, yet which, as you confided to me, is overshadowed by a continual misunderstanding, is, I fear, very common indeed at the present day. It is only by great forbearance, and great skill, that any household in which persons of very different degrees of culture have to live together on terms of equality, can be maintained in perfect peace; and neither the art nor the forbearance is naturally an attribute of youth. A man whose scholarly attainments were equal to your own, and whose experience of men and women was wider, could no doubt offer you counsel both wise and practical, yet I can hardly say that I should like you better if you followed it. I cannot blame you for having the natural characteristics of your years, an honest love of the best truth that you have attained to, an intolerance of inaccuracy on all subjects, a simple faith in the possibility of teaching others, even elderly ladies, when they happen to know less than yourself. All these characteristics are in themselves blameless; and yet in your case, and in thousands of other similar cases, they often bring clouds of storm and trial upon houses which, in a less rapidly progressive century than our own, might have been blessed with uninterrupted peace. The truth is, that you are in a false position relatively to your mother, and your mother is in a false position relatively to you. She expects deference, and deference is scarcely compatible with contradiction; certainly, if there be contradiction at all, it must be very rare, very careful, and very delicate. You, on the other hand, although no doubt full of respect and affection for your mother in your heart, cannot hear her authoritatively enunciating anything that you know to be erroneous, without feeling irresistibly urged to set her right. She is rather a talkative lady; she does not like to hear a conversation going forward without taking a part in it, and rather an important part, so that whatever subject is talked about in her presence, that subject she will talk about also. Even before specialists your mother has an independence of opinion, and a degree of faith in her own conclusions, which would be admirable if they were founded upon right reason and a careful study of the subject. Medical men, and even lawyers, do not intimidate her; she is convinced that she knows more about disease than the physician, and more about legal business than an old attorney. In theology no parson can approach her; but here a woman may consider herself on her own ground, as theology is the speciality of women.