The boy born of these ante-natal circumstances resembled his father in his coarser mental calibre, while he lacked the ambition and steady purpose which characterized the latter. He, however, took to the keys of the piano as a duck takes to water. When a lad, his fingers grasped the chords and flew swiftly through the scales. This endless series of polkas, schottisches, and cotillions wearied the entire household. He hated classical music, and cared little for vocal melody or harmony. Two years after the birth of this boy, a younger sister of Mrs. X. made them a visit of some months’ duration, and she insisted that Clara should take part with her in duets, notwithstanding that her unused voice and pregnant state promised little success from the effort. As soon as Mr. X. was quite out of sight on the way to his business (for the old criticism still rankled in her mind, and the mutual performance was kept a secret from him), the two would be at the instrument with Mendelssohn, Wallace, and others before them, making delicious harmony. There is nothing like singing to free the soul, and awaken its heights and depths. Nothing could have been more fortunate for little Clara, who made her entry into the world before her aunt’s departure, than the antecedent occupation of her mother. In time her voice proved to be as sweet and far stronger than her mother’s, and in all her nature she realized the inspiring effect of those hours when persuaded by her sister, her mother had lost sight of herself in the pure emotions and thoughts of those famous masters. GRIEF. The _cause_ of grief very seriously affects its character. If it is based on a sense of wrong, as in the case of a husband’s unfaithfulness, then indignation, anger, malice make a part of it, and a pregnant wife, distracted by these emotions, conveys to her child, as we have shown, the violent emotions she herself experienced. If the bad, the unprincipled conduct of a son from whom we had expected reverence and manliness bows us down, a sense of wrong and shame, a feeling that it _might have been avoided_, mixes with our grief and embitters it. But if death, from natural causes, which no woman’s eye could foresee and provide against, strikes down one near and dear to us, we simply mourn, and this grief may open the inner chambers of the soul hitherto closed. Thus Mrs. W., an external, worldly-minded woman, not wanting in common benevolence or sense of duty, simply without dignity or elevation of character, was married to an energetic, sensible, practical man, the manager and owner of a large foundry. Their circumstances were, therefore, quite easy. An inferior kind of social life occupied much of Mrs. W.’s time, and amid these conditions their first child, a girl, was born. This child, on the principle that inferior fruit ripens early, was as mature as she would ever be at sixteen. At twenty she was shallow, pretentious, illiterate, which last her mother was not.