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.