Eugenia, certain of the subject to which he would lead, and feeling she could not have more to hear than to say, gave him a chair, and composedly seated herself next to him.

'My dear Eugenia,' said he, taking her passive hand, 'this is the moment that more grievously than ever I lament the absence of your invaluable Mother. All I have to offer to your consideration she could much better have laid before you; and her dictates would have met with the attention they so completely deserve.'

'Was my Mother, then, Sir,' said she, reproachfully, 'unapprized of the worldly darkness in which I have been brought up? Is she unacquainted that a little knowledge of books and languages is what alone I have been taught?'

'We are all but too apt,' answered Mr. Tyrold, mildly, though surprised, 'to deem nothing worth attaining but what we have missed, nothing worth possessing but what we are denied. How many are there, amongst the untaught and unaccomplished, who would think an escape such as yours, of all intellectual darkness, a compensation for every other evil!'

'They could think so only, Sir, while, like me, they lived immured always in the same house, were seen always by the same people, and were total strangers to the sensations they might excite in any others.'

'My dear Eugenia, grieved as I am at the present subject of your ruminations, I rejoice to see in you a power of reflection, and of combination, so far above your years. And it is a soothing idea to me to dwell upon the ultimate benevolence of Providence, even in circumstances the most afflicting: for if chance has been unkind to you, Nature seems, with fostering foresight, to have endowed you with precisely those powers that may best set aside her malignity.'

'I see, Sir,' cried she, a little moved, 'the kindness of your intention; but pardon me if I anticipate to you its ill success. I have thought too much upon my situation and my destiny to admit any fallacious comfort. Can you, indeed, when once her eyes are opened, can you expect to reconcile to existence a poor young creature who sees herself an object of derision and disgust? Who, without committing any crime, without offending any human being, finds she cannot appear but to be pointed at, scoffed and insulted!'

'O my child! with what a picture do you wound my heart, and tear your own peace and happiness! Wretches who in such a light can view outward deficiencies cannot merit a thought, are below even contempt, and ought not to be disdained, but forgotten. Make a conquest, then, my Eugenia, of yourself; be as superior in your feelings as in your understanding, and remember what Addison admirably says in one of the Spectators: 'A too acute sensibility of personal defects, is one of the greatest weaknesses of self-love.'

'I should be sorry, Sir, you should attribute to vanity what I now suffer. No! it is simply the effect of never hearing, never knowing, that so severe a call was to be made upon my fortitude, and therefore never arming myself to sustain it.'

Then, suddenly, and with great emotion clasping her hands: 'O if ever I have a family of my own,' she cried, 'my first care shall be to tell my daughters of all their infirmities! They shall be familiar, from their childhood, to their every defect—Ah! they must be odious indeed if they resemble their poor mother!'