From her first appearance as a child, those elements of humanity are most
prominent in her which, unguided and uncontrolled, are most fraught with
danger to the higher life; and for her there is no real outward guidance
or control whatever. The passionate craving for human sympathy and love,
which meets no fuller response than from the rude instinctive fondness of
her father and the carefully-regulated affection of her brother, on the
one hand prepares her for the storm of passion, and on the other, chilled
and thrown back by neglect and refusal, threatens her with equal danger
of hardness and self-inclusion. The strong artist temperament, the power
of spontaneous and intense enjoyment in everything fair and glad to eye
and ear, repressed by the uncongenial accessories around her, tends to
concentrate her existence in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if
it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no
sustenance. This danger is for her the greater and more insidious,
because in her the sensuous, so strongly developed, is refined from all
its grossness by the presence of imagination and thought.

When at last, amid the desolation that has come upon her home, and the
increasing bareness of all the accessories of her young life, its deeper
needs and higher aspirations awaken to definite purpose and seek definite
action, the direction they take is toward a hard stern asceticism,
cramping up all life and energy within a narrow round of drudgeries and
privations. She strives, as many an earnest impassioned nature like hers
has done in similar circumstances, to fashion her own cross, and to make
it as hard as may be to bear. She would deny to herself the very beauty
of earth and sky, the music of birds and rippling waters, and everything
sweet and glad, as temptations and snares. From all this she is brought
back by Philip. But he, touching as he is in the humility and tender
unselfishness of his love, is too exclusively of the artist temperament
to give direction or sustainment to the deeper moral requirements of her