Page:Sexology.djvu/154

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

of characters as, with a smile full of melancholy and tenderness, he says to his daughter, "I know I am childish, but I am so happy to be your child!"

We have arising in our memory an old man, bent with age and disease, who came from a distant city to breathe his last, as he fondly supposed, in the arms of his only son, comfortably established in a household of his own. It was one of those pitiful cases of gentlemanly respectability long maintained in governmental employ, where the salary ceases with superannuation; so he became at once a charge upon the son. "Well do we remember the ardent welcome he received, and the generous instructions given us to "Do everything in our power for the old gentleman." But, as the weeks lengthened into months, and, the months multiplied to years, the son grew impatient of death's delay, and, but for an angel daughter who sped to his bedside and there remained, the old man had been deserted by the entire household. She came to him young, and fresh, and blooming, but the long watches, and, above all, the "lifting" day and night, robbed her of these attributes forever. Nothing could exceed the exquisite tenderness of this girl, the little epithets so sadly sweet, the insurmountable grief with which she closed the dear, dear eyes in death, unless it be the meanness of the wretch who then, and not till then, ostentatiously displayed his pretended grief beside her! Both of them will recognize this picture, thank God!

Emancipated, as she most assuredly will be, from the chains which now restrain her, who can estimate the part which the daughter shall yet fulfill in the life of the family! These shackles are: insufficiency of education for the rich girl; insufficiency of salary for the poor girl; exclusion from most of the professions; inferiority in the