She lived on, though she
would willingly have died at any moment, and the whole fabric of
her life was shattered. Again, I think of a devoted daughter who
had done the same office for an old and not very robust father. I
heard her once say that the sorrow of her mother's death had been
almost nullified for her by finding that she could do everything
for and be everything to her father, whom she almost adored. She
had refused an offer of marriage from a man whom she sincerely
loved, that she might not leave her father, and she never even told
her father of the incident, for fear that he might have felt that
he had stood in the way of her happiness. When he died, she too
found herself utterly desolate, without ties and without
occupation, an elderly woman almost without friends or companions.
Ought one to feel that this kind of jealous absorption in a single
individual affection is a mistake? It certainly brought both the
wife and daughter an intense happiness, but in both cases the
relation was so close and so intimate that it tended gradually to
seclude them from all other relations.
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