“You learned a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother. Ologies of all kinds, from morning to night. If there is any ology left, of any description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can say is, I hope I shall never hear its name.”
“I can hear you, mother, when you have strength to go on.” This, to keep her from floating away.
“But there’s something—not an ology at all—that your father has missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don’t know what it is. I have often sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its name now. But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write to him, to find out, for God’s sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give me a pen.”
When Louisa, unable to resist alone the temptation to go with Mr. Harthouse, fled to her father and told him in such earnest words that she cursed the hour she had been born to submit to his training, she said:
“I don’t reproach you, father. What you have never nurtured in me, you have never nurtured in yourself; but oh! if you had only done so long ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a much better and much happier creature I should have been this day!”
On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand and groaned aloud.
“Father, if you had known, when we were last together here, what even I feared while I strove against it—as it has been my task from infancy to strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in my heart; if you had known that there lingered in my breast sensibilities, affections, weakness capable of being cherished into strength, defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic than his Creator is—would you have given me to the husband whom I am now sure that I hate?”
He said, “No, no, my poor child.”
“Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that have hardened and spoiled me? Would you have robbed me—for no one’s enrichment—only for the greater desolation of this world—of the immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in which I should have learned to be more humble, and more trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?”
“Oh, no, no! No, Louisa.”