Forcing a daughter.
“After all, sister, what need of haste? ’Tis a young bird yet. Why push it out of the nest? When once it is gone you will never get it back. Let the pretty one have her little day to play and sing and be happy. Does she not make this garden a sort of Paradise with her little ways and her sweet words? Now, my sister, these all belong to you; but, once she is given to another, there is no saying what may come. One thing only may you count on with certainty: that these dear days when she is all day by your side and sleeps in your bosom all night are over,—she will belong to you no more, but to a strange man who hath neither toiled nor wrought for her, and all her pretty ways and dutiful thoughts must be for him.”
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.
Beautiful old age.
Her face was round and rosy, with a healthful, downy softness, suggestive of a ripe peach. Her hair, partially silvered by age, was parted smoothly back from her high, placid forehead, on which time had written no inscription except “Peace on earth, good will to men,” and beneath shone a large pair of clear, honest, loving, brown eyes; you only needed to look straight into them, to feel that you saw to the bottom of a heart as good and true as ever throbbed in woman’s bosom. So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don’t somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?
Exaction.
It is a great mistake to suppose that a woman with no heart will be an easy creditor in the exchange of affection. There is not on earth a more merciless exactor of love from others than a thoroughly selfish woman; and the more unlovely she grows, the more jealously and scrupulously she exacts love to the uttermost farthing.