“Your children will be a stalwart set, then,” I replied, “with their mother a mere mush of concession.” He did not see what she had to do with it. The children would be _his_ children, and being his, would do him credit. He was not wanting in clear reasoning powers, and having great family pride--pride of race, I _should_ say--after considerable argument, was honest enough to admit that there must be truth on my side. UNIMPRESSIBILITY. There are some cold, narrow, positive women so impervious to the influence of others, so insensitive that the husband, if he is superior, can hardly ever represent himself in his children. I am acquainted with a gentleman conspicuous among his fellows for grace of soul and nobility of nature. He has the tenderness of a woman combined with masculine heroism. Of his six children not one equals the father. The mother, self-willed and external in character (though, of course, violently opposed to woman’s rights and strong-minded women), had children much alike, and all like herself. A very faulty, but sympathetic woman, has often finer children than those frigidly virtuous mothers who are never stirred to the depths by any event or consideration. An artist of no mean powers took to wife a gentle, characterless girl. He did not _wish_ his wife to be intellectual, and decidedly she was not. They had children “fast,” and it was not long before her amiability changed to fretfulness. She flung all her cares on her husband, had a doctor in the house continually, and at thirty was a faded, complaining, old woman. At thirty-four her seventh child was laid in her arms. The father, despairing of the others, stuck a paint brush in the tiny fist of the latest born, and vowed he should be a painter. In vain,--this son, it is true, dabbled in paints, but had no more genius than the others, notwithstanding that he was a seventh child. ASKING FOR MONEY. Mrs. Myrtle was a lovely young woman, lovely in mind and body, but for one defect--viz., a want of firmness and self-esteem. She was surrounded by all the comforts and elegancies that wealth could procure, and was yet the abject slave of a gentlemanly tyrant. She could not receive or pay visits, go shopping, or to a _matinée_ without first obtaining permission from her master. And she was always giving an account of herself in a pacificatory manner. When she suffered humiliation, she blamed her husband, and not the standard she had given him. Mrs. M. had three boys, and they were the most inveterate liars. How could it be otherwise, when their mother spent half her time in eluding inspection, and half in making confession, while she regularly searched Mr. M.’s pockets for coins that could be spent without explaining “what for.” * * * * *