t she is a good scholar and has
accepted the Greek chair in a Western college, and looking again you
see she has a strong frame, a capable head and large bright eyes. Lydia
dressed in the mode, wore the high-heeled shoes that give such a dainty
look to the foot and gait, and came into a room with a great effusion
of fashionableness; yet she was not in the least what she seemed. She
had a great deal of what is more pleasing than mere appearance, and
that is character. She was ambitious and energetic. She did tatting
when she did nothing else--said it concealed her lack of repose and
liability to fidget. She was able to draw _la quintessence de tout_:
she could make a mountain-spring of a mole-hill. She also had a touch
of temper: those who are perfectly amiable are nothing else.

I was a youth blue-eyed and fair of face, tall, thin and having a
complying spirit that has been--But let me not anticipate. The race
after fashion ever wearied me--I shall stop early at some
standing-collar or heavy-neckcloth period--and I never cared much for
money--could live with it or without it, desiring "this man's art or
that man's scope" rather than his cash. There is such a great majority
of poor folks, I expected to be one of them; still, I had a taste for
honesty, asked favors of nobody, considered the least debt a
degradation, and thought myself better than most rich people. I was of
the family and the religion of Plato, who peddled oil to pay his
expenses while travelling in Egypt.

We discover in others what they most wish to hide: therefore I early
discovered that Lydia's mother, who had a large girl-family, and who
knew that the supply of some one to love greatly exceeds the demand,
was anxious to secure me as a son-in-law. I was glad of it, for, let
poets and novelists say what they will, the young fellow who marries
with the approval of friends drifts happily on, while the rash boy who
weds against the good sense of his elders is dragged bleeding along a
rough way. So I married Lydia, and began life in gladness and content.
I liked her family and they liked me. It puzzles me to see how the
English mother-in-law, who is a grum-voiced, dogmatic and belligerent
person with a jointure to bequeath, came to be engrafted on our
literature. The inoffensive delicacy of an American elderly woman
forbids her the role of her British sister. Our mother-in-law troubles
are mostly confined to our low foreign population. Neither have we a
c