“All undeniable truth, Emmy; but, for all that, John seems stiff as a ramrod, and their front-parlor is like a tomb. You mustn’t let them petrify him.”
Her face clouded over a little.
“John is different here from what he was at our house. He has been brought up differently,—O, entirely differently from what we were; and when he comes back into the old house, the old business, and the old place between his father and mother and sisters, he goes back into the old ways. He loves me all the same, but he does not show it in the same ways, and I must learn, you know, to take it on trust. He is very busy,—works hard all day, and all for me; and mother says women are unreasonable that ask any other proof of love from their husbands than what they give by working for them all the time. She never lectures me, but I know she thought I was a silly little petted child, and she told me one day how she brought up John. She never petted him; she put him away alone to sleep, from the time he was six months old; she never fed him out of his regular hours when he was a baby, no matter how much he cried; she never let him talk baby-talk, or have any baby-talk talked to him, but was very careful to make him speak all his words plain from the very first; she never encouraged him to express his love by kisses or caresses, but taught him that the only proof of love was exact obedience. I remember John’s telling me of his running to her once and hugging her round the neck, when he had come in without wiping his shoes, and she took off his arms and said: ‘My son, this isn’t the best way to show love. I should be much better pleased to have you come in quietly and wipe your shoes than to come and kiss me when you forget to do what I say.’”
“Dreadful old jade!” said I, irreverently, being then only twenty-three.
“Now, Chris, I won’t have anything to say to you, if this is the way you are going to talk,” said Emily, pouting, though a mischievous gleam darted into her eyes. “Really, however, I think she carried things too far, though she is so good. I only said it to excuse John, and show how he was brought up.”
“Poor fellow!” said I. “I know now why he is so hopelessly shut up, and walled up. Never a warmer heart than he keeps stowed away there inside of the fortress, with the drawbridge down and moat all round.”
“They are all warm-hearted inside,” said Emily. “Would you think she didn’t love him? Once when he was sick, she watched with him seventeen nights without taking off her clothes; she scarcely would eat all the time: Jane told me so. She loves him better than she loves herself. It’s perfectly dreadful sometimes to see how intense she is when anything concerns him; it’s her principle that makes her so cold and quiet.”
“And a devilish one it is!” said I.
“Chris, you are really growing wicked!”
“I use the word seriously, and in good faith,” said I. “Who but the Father of Evil ever devised such plans for making goodness hateful, and keeping the most-heavenly part of our nature so under lock and key that for the greater part of our lives we get no use of it? Of what benefit is a mine of love burning where it warms nobody, does nothing but blister the soul within with its imprisoned heat? Love repressed grows morbid, acts in a thousand perverse ways. These three women, I’ll venture to say, are living in the family here like three frozen islands, knowing as little of each other’s inner life as if parted by eternal barriers of ice,—and all because a cursed principle in the heart of the mother has made her bring them up in violence to Nature.”