"She is like a seraph in her serenity, and I might just as well have
been talking to a stone wall for all the effect my words seemed to
have. Of course you can prevent her; she understands that; but I
should like to see you alter her opinion."
I concluded to try. Accordingly, I summoned Winona to the library that
evening, and we were closeted with folded doors, as the phrase is, for
an hour and a half. Being a father I was desirous naturally to be
judicious and yet sympathetic; being a philosopher, I was willing to be
enlightened if I was ignorant. My son David had demonstrated to me
that a young germ of tuberculosis has all the engaging attractiveness
of a six months' old baby; perhaps it had been reserved for my daughter
to prove to me that I had never had constitutional headaches. If so,
what an amount of unnecessary misery I had undergone from sheer lack of
knowledge!
Conventional conceptions are slow to relax their grip even when one's
reason is prepared to discard them as out-worn. I am not giving
utterance in this sententious fashion to distrust in allopathy; I
simply am thinking of the qualms which persisted in harrowing my soul
as I gazed upon my very beautiful daughter, and tried to feel proud
that she was endeavoring to do something useful. My associations with
lovely women are so intimately associated with the ball-room floor and
the purlieus of polite society, that, in spite of my secret sympathy
with the progress of the sex, I could not completely school my mental
machinery so as to exclude a lurking regret that such arrant good looks
were to be wasted upon people who had nothing the matter with them, and
who would, perhaps, be slow in recognizing the fact.
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