have not succeeded, and shall not succeed in expressing the
affection I feel for you, or the triumph with which I find that what
I undertook as a distasteful and thankless duty has rescued my life
and labor from waste. My literary travail, seriously as it has
occupied us both, I now value only for the share it has had in
educating you; and you will be guilty of no disloyalty to me when
you come to see that though I sifted as much sand as most men, I
found no gold. I ask you to remember, then, that I did my duty to
you long before it became pleasurable or even hopeful. And, when you
are older and have learned from your mother's friends how I failed
in my duty to her, you will perhaps give me some credit for having
conciliated the world for your sake by abandoning habits and
acquaintances which, whatever others may have thought of them, did
much while they lasted to make life endurable to me.

"Although your future will not concern me, I often find myself
thinking of it. I fear you will soon find that the world has not yet
provided a place and a sphere of action for wise and well-instructed
women. In my younger days, when the companionship of my fellows was
a necessity to me, I voluntarily set aside my culture, relaxed my
principles, and acquired common tastes, in order to fit myself for
the society of the only men within my reach; for, if I had to live
among bears, I had rather be a bear than a man. Let me warn you
against this. Never attempt to accommodate yourself to the world by
self-degradation. Be patient; and you will enjoy frivolity all the
more because you are not frivolous: much as the world will respect
your knowledge all the more because of its own ignorance.

"Some day, I expect and hope, you will marry. You will then have an
opportunity of making an irremediable mistake, against the