for his own ambition's sake, is not pardoned, and so if every picture
which the world holds up to view, presents a fair and brilliant
surface, whose business may it be to ask in an insinuating tone,
whether the other side is just as enchanting or not?

If the world insists upon calling an apparently happy home, happy in
reality, then ours was indisputably so, but the world and I have long
since ceased to agree upon matters of such a nature.

My father was married for some time to his second wife before any
material change came into their lives. I took advantage of the
interval and grew considerably, having proved a most opportune victim
on many an occasion for my disappointed step-mother's ill-humour. This
latter personage had contracted several real or imaginary disorders
and absorbed her own soul, with all its most tender attributes, in her
constant demand and need for a sympathy and solicitude which were
nowhere to be found. Her husband had retired by degrees into the
exclusive refuge of his scientific and literary pursuits, and lived as
effectually apart from the woman he had married, as far as friendly
intercourse and mutual confidence were concerned, as though they were
strangers.

And yet, whenever Mrs. Hampden found herself well enough to go out, my
father accompanied her with the most amiable urbanity; thus, from time
to time, they appeared among the gay coterie to which they always
belonged in name, looking as happy and contented as most husbands and
wives do, who, for half a dozen years or so, have been trying one
another's patience with more or less success.

Thus by a strange unfitness of things, will one unheeded uncared-for