“I have read something, dear grandmother, that is more objectionable than gayety in Mrs. Ellicott’s face. Gayety I love dearly in old people—I love yours—”
“Calling Mrs. Ellicott ‘old people,’ Louisa! you are certainly stark mad! with all those long white teeth glittering defiance of such a calumny.”
“Gently! gently!” said Madam Stanwood; “teeth to the contrary notwithstanding, Mrs. Ellicott is my senior by some years.”
“But how different!” exclaimed Alice, warmly, “how different her gayety and yours—as different as lightning and sunshine—”
“Nay, Alice,” said Madam Stanwood, in a serious tone, “I must protest against being compared or contrasted with Mrs. Ellicott. I asked you what you read in her face. A capability, at least, of feeling and suffering?”
“You will think me satirical, grandmother; but she does make other people suffer so much, that—but I wont say it—and yet that hard face, those authoritative manners, that ever smiling mouth, put them altogether, she is just one of those persons I should think born not to suffer any thing, nor to feel much for any body.”
Madame Stanwood looked at the placid face, which had just expressed so harsh an opinion, with a melancholy smile.
“Come hither, Alice—and you, Louisa; let me teach you not to guess from the froth on the tossing wave, what is the deep calm that lies a thousand fathoms below. Long may it be before you know from the quick sympathy of experience, to detect the sigh under the smile, or to see how the lonely tears quench the conventional sparkles that seemed so brilliant.”
The young girls drew near, awed by the serious and almost sad demeanor of their relative.
“Something you said, Louisa—something that touched long silent chords in my heart. They do not make music there—they are, as your song says, ‘echoes of harp-strings, broken long ago.’ But it was of Mrs. Ellicott we were talking. I happen to know a circumstance which, as yet, is concealed from her nearest friends, except her medical adviser. This woman, so gay, so social, so alive to all that she feels or fancies her duty to society, had, only six months ago, the assurance of her physician, backed by the opinions of the first practitioners in New York, that her recovery is hopeless—absolutely hopeless.”