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Smith has got a school in Auckland, you know." I did not know, but I found that a year or two after the death of my brother Ambrose, his widow had become the second wife of the master of a boarding-school at Sydney, and that it was there that Harold, at ten years old, had fought all the boys, including the step-children, and had been so audacious and uncontrollable, that she had been forced to return him to his uncle and aunt in the "Bush."
And the unhappy step-children of nature whose inheritance it is, seldom find a deliverer good at need; for as the world draws no distinction between their grave affliction and that other remediable misery of youth, it will sanction no other treatment than banter or mockery, which does but infuse yet more deeply the mournful dye.
There were stories rife in the village that her step-children were too much for poor, pretty Priscilla; that while her husband wrote his sermons in the little brown room the young wife pined and moped in her green sitting-room. Uncle Max found a picture of her one day in a garret where they stored apples; a faint musty smell clung to the canvas.
I have since had opportunities of observing the free Indians, who appear less stupid, and in many respects more civilized, than the proselytes of the gente rationale, as the Spaniards here call themselves; and I am convinced that the system of instruction and discipline adopted by the monks, has certainly tended to degrade even these step-children of Nature.
It is difficult to refrain from a deep degree of sympathy for this so brilliant and accomplished Archduchess Maria-Theresa, whose character is best illustrated by the fact that she is literally worshipped by her grown-up step-children. The sudden death of her husband was not only a cruel bereavement, but was also the destruction of great and much-cherished ambitions.
But Emily! there was the tender grace of motherhood in her every action towards a little child; her yearning sense of loss found its best appeasement in the pretty exactions and artless dependence of small young creatures. No; Emily might spoil step-children if she had them, but she could not be unkind. His cold opinion became a moderately pleased conviction.
Just when employment and good fortune had come to the step-children, and her own were better fed and clothed than ever before, the pain that had always lurked, constant but dull, near her tired heart, grew fierce and triumphantly strong; clutching her in its talons, biting, gnawing, worrying, leaving her each week with slighter powers of resistance.
These it was who would ask Esther over a cup of tea: "Are you going on living in this house, my dear?" or: "Shall you join your husband at his father's? And will his father and the step-children stay on there?"
"Oh," said Esther, "I'm sorry for that. So you are one of the step-children. Sit down, won't you. Oh, do take this chair." Lydia was only too glad to take any chair and get the strain off her trembling knees. It was no trivial task, she saw, to face Jeff's wife and drag her back to wifehood. But she ignored the proffer of the softer chair.
The sons of wealthy families fought shoulder to shoulder with children of the proletariat. The sight of these step-children of Poland fighting for their fatherland stirred the heart of Ostrovski, and he subsequently wrote: "This spectacle could not fail to make your heart ache.
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