expressly excluded. The squire's lady and Clem became great friends.
She discovered that his mother was a Frenchwoman, and this was a bond
between them. She discovered also that Clem was artistic, that he
was devotedly fond of music, that he could draw a little, paint a
little, and she believed in the divine right of talent wherever it
might be found to assert a claim of equality with those who were
better born. The women in the country-side were shy of her; for the
men she could not possibly care, and no doubt she must at times have
got rather weary of her heavy husband with his one outlook towards
the universal in the person of George James Fox, and the Whig policy
of 1802. I am under some disadvantage in telling this part of my
story, because I was far away from home, and only knew afterwards at
second hand what the course of events had been; but I learned them
from one who was intimately concerned, and I do not think I can be
mistaken on any essential point. I imagine that by this time Mrs.
Butts must have become changed into what she was in later years. She
had grown older since she and I had parted; she had seen trouble; her
child had been born, and although she was not exactly estranged from
Clem, for neither he nor she would have admitted any coolness, she
had learned that she was nothing specially to him. I have often
noticed what an imperceptible touch, what a slight shifting in the
balance of opposing forces, will alter the character. I have
observed a woman, for example, essentially the same at twenty and
thirty--who is there who is not always essentially the same?--and
yet, what was a defect at twenty, has become transformed and
transfigured into a benignant virtue at thirty; translating the whole
nature from the human to the divine. Some slight depression has been
wrought here, and some slight lift has been given there, and beauty
and order have miraculously emerged from what was chaotic. The same
thing may continually be noticed in the hereditary transmission of