Minturn presents upon presents. I have never counted her lost days, and I have never spoken a harsh word to her, and now she is going away when she knows how important she is to me, just because some absurd doctor had put it into her head that sewing don't agree with her!"
If Mrs. Ardley had understood the first principles of physiology, and she was perfectly capable of comprehending them, and if she had felt the duties of her station, and applied these principles to the persons cast upon her care, Mary Minturn would not have lost her health, and they might have continued to the end of their lives to live together with reciprocal benefit, instead of parting with smothered reproaches on the one side for slighted favours, and smothered gratitude on the other for the exercise of virtues that, after all, were merely virtues of constitution.
After one or two other abortive attempts at reform, Mrs. Ardley reverted to her old mode of sailing with the current, and letting things take their own way, "Convinced", she said, "there was no use in trying to have matters too perfect."
Our conclusion is, that old abuses in families, as in states, are not of sudden or easy reform.
