delights them in a hearty, natural, womanly way. Sympathy looks
ironical, if they ever show it: love seems to be an affair of
calculation, or mockery, or contemptuous sufferance, if they ever feel
it.

To women such as these, my sister Clara presented as complete a
contrast as could well be conceived. In this contrast lay the secret
of her influence, of the voluntary tribute of love and admiration
which followed her wherever she went.

Few men have not their secret moments of deep feeling--moments when,
amid the wretched trivialities and hypocrisies of modern society, the
image will present itself to their minds of some woman, fresh,
innocent, gentle, sincere; some woman whose emotions are still warm
and impressible, whose affections and sympathies can still appear in
her actions, and give the colour to her thoughts; some woman in whom
we could put as perfect faith and trust, as if we were children; whom
we despair of finding near the hardening influences of the world; whom
we could scarcely venture to look for, except in solitary places far
away in the country; in little rural shrines, shut up from society,
among woods and fields, and lonesome boundary-hills. When any women
happen to realise, or nearly to realise, such an image as this, they
possess that universal influence which no rivalry can ever approach.
On them really depends, and by then is really preserved, that claim
upon the sincere respect and admiration of men, on which the power of
the whole sex is based--the power so often assumed by the many, so
rarely possessed but by the few.

It was thus with my sister. Thus, wherever she went, though without
either the inclination, or the ambition to shine, she eclipsed women