VII.
A woman without love is like an author without ideas; it is impossible to imagine one without the other. And jusst as a bad author is sure to fail in literature, so does an unloved and unloving woman fail in accomplishing the end of her existence, and spends her days uselessly on the stage of life.
Jenny Kuc̓erová had never loved before she came to Labutín. Some ideal fancies of her girlish days, in the dawn of ripening womanhood, while she was still completing her education at the various higher schools in Prague, do not count here. They were only like the blush of the morning, glowing for the moment, but airy and transient. Her mother had died when she was ten years old, and though her father had never married again, till the young girl had lost much of the poetry and—what is more important—much of the necessary preparation for the battle of life, which only the watchful care of a loving mother can teach her child. No education, however good and thorough it may be, can ever make up to a young girl for the loss of such a mother’s training and example; and often, in decisive moments, the want of it turns out to be the stumbling-block that matters her whole future welfare.
Mr. Kuc̓era, Jenny’s father, was a grave, earnest man,
