A very remarkably superior woman, but without quick, external
perceptive faculties to give her insight into character, mistook a
handsome, unprincipled brute for a man and gentleman. What she endured
for six months after her marriage could not be written. When she found
herself _enciente_, for the sake of the child she sought refuge with an
humble friend at a distance from her unhappy home. Being pinched for
means, she earned money by her needle, endeavoring, at the same time,
to banish from her memory the recollection of her late cruel experience.
Day after day this regal woman sat sewing with Elizabeth Browning’s
poems open on a chair beside her committing to memory the most
interior of those religious strains as she stitched, stitched in the
solitude of the low-roofed cottage by the river. No exhilarating rides
on horseback, such as had been her wont, no genial, social company,
no brisk walks and happy communion with nature, were possible in her
peculiar circumstances. She must forego the healthy, harmonious,
external life of her past, and live solely within the inmost chambers
of her soul.
At two years old the little girl born of these untoward conditions was
lovely, large-eyed, thoughtful, considerate, and tender in her ways as
any lady. “Where are your wings, Mary?” said a gentleman who noticed
the radiant face at the mother’s garden gate. For these seemed only
necessary to prove her a seraph.
Alas! to her mother’s infinite sorrow, she very soon departed to more
blissful realms. The constantly repressed emotions of her mother, and
her sedentary life, had caused an imperfect action of the lungs, and a
low vital tone generally. Grief shortens the breathing as joy expands
the lungs. Little Mary was extremely narrow-chested, with sloping
shoulders, and hence quite unable to supply sufficient sustenance for
so very large a brain, whose weight she bent under, and died, shortly
after completing her second year, of acute hydrocephalus.