. To sit down, in short, you've GOT to sit there; there isn't
another square inch of the whole place over which you haven't got, as
everything shrieks at you, to step lively. Poor Goward, I could see at
a glance, wanted very much to sit down--looked indeed very much as if he
wanted never, NEVER again to get up.

I hovered there--I couldn't help it, a bit gloatingly--before I pounced;
and yet even when he became aware of me, as he did in a minute, he
didn't shift his position by an inch, but only took me and my dreadful
meaning, with his wan stare, as a part of the strange burden of
his fate. He didn't seem even surprised to speak of; he had waked
up--premising his brief, bewildered delirium--to the sense that
something NATURAL must happen, and even to the fond hope that something
natural WOULD; and I was simply the form in which it was happening.
I came nearer, I stood before him; and he kept up at me the oddest
stare--which was plainly but the dumb yearning that I would explain,
explain! He wanted everything told him--but every single thing; as if,
after a tremendous fall, or some wild parabola through the air, the
effect of a violent explosion under his feet, he had landed at a vast
distance from his starting-point and required to know where he was.
Well, the charming thing was that this affected me as giving the very
sharpest point to the idea that, in asking myself how I should deal with
him, I had already so vividly entertained.

VIII. THE MARRIED DAUGHTER, By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

We start in life with the most preposterous of all human claims--that
one should be understood. We get bravely over that after awhile; but
not until the idea has been knocked out of us by the hardest. I used to
worry a good deal, myself, because nobody--distinctly not one person--in
our family understood me; that is, me in my relation to themselves;
nothing else, of course, mattered so much. But that was before I was
married. I think it was because Tom understood me from the very first
eye-beam, that I loved him enough to marry him and learn to understand
HIM. I always knew in my heart that he had the advantage of me in that
beautiful art: I suppose one might call it the soul-art. At all events,
it has been of the least possible consequence to me since I had Tom,
whether any one else in the world understood me or not.

I suppose--in fact, I know--that it is this unfortunate affair of
Peggy's which has brought up all that old