Leopold Mozart, for separation only increased the love that had sprung
up between the young people since they had met again in Vienna, and
Mozart had found the little fourteen-year-old girl of his Mannheim
visit grown to young womanhood.

There seems little doubt that the Webers, with the exception of
Constance, were a shiftless lot. They had drifted from place to place
and had finally come to Vienna, because Aloysia had moved there with
her husband. When Mozart finally decided to marry Constance, come what
might, he wrote his father a letter which shows that his eyes were wide
open to the faults of the family, and by the calm, almost judicial,
manner in which he refers to the virtues of his future wife, that his
was no hastily formed attachment, based merely on superficial
attractions.

He does not spare the family in his analysis of their traits. If he
seems ungallant in his references to his future Queen of the Night and
to the prima donna of his "Elopement from the Seraglio," to say nothing
of his former attachment for her, one must remember that this is a
letter from a son to a father, in which frankness is permissible. He
admits the intemperance and shrewishness of the mother; characterizes
Josepha as lazy and vulgar; calls Aloysia a malicious person and
coquette; dismisses the youngest, Sophie, as too young to be anything
but simply a good though thoughtless creature. Surely not an
attractive picture and not a family one would enter lightly.

What drew him to Constance? Let him answer that question himself.
"But the middle one, my good, dear Constance," he writes to his father,
"is a martyr among them, and for that reason, perhaps, the best
hearted, cleverest, and, in a word, the best among them. . . . She is