what woman on earth can ever suppress her grievances? It's our
feminine way to air them before the world, as it's a man's to bury
them deep in his own breast and brood over them.

My mother, she told me, had been a widow when my father married
her--a rich young widow. She had gone away, a mere girl, to
Australia with her first husband, a clergyman, who was lost at sea
two or three years after, on the voyage home to England without her.
She had one little girl by her first husband, but the child died
quite young: and then she married my father, who met her first in
Australia while she waited for news of the clergyman's safety. Her
family always disapproved of the second marriage. My father had no
money, it seemed; and mamma was well off, having means of her own to
start with, like Aunt Emma, and having inherited also her first
husband's property, which was very considerable. He had left it to
his little girl, and after her to his wife; so that first my father,
and then I myself, came in, in the end, to both the little estates,
though my mother's had been settled on the children of the first
marriage. Aunt Emma always thought my father had married for money:
and she said he had been hard and unkind to mamma: not indeed cruel;
he wasn't a cruel man; but severe and wilful. He made her do exactly
as he wished about everything, in a masterful sort of way, that no
woman could stand against. He crushed her spirit entirely, Aunt Emma
told me; she had no will of her own, poor thing: his individuality
was so strong, that it overrode my mother's weak nature rough-shod.

Not that he was rough. He never scolded her; he never illtreated
her; but he said to her plainly, "You are to do so and so;" and she
obeyed like a child. She never dared to question him.