I cannot but say, however, looking back, that she was kind to me, in her way. She was always good-natured, and put up with me and tried to make me talk. She was kind: but _they_ were not kind. As soon as my father and she got together they forgot everything. They sat and talked together, forgetting my very existence. They went out walking together. Sometimes even he would kiss her, without minding that I was there; and all this filled me with contempt for his weakness. I could not support such nonsense--at his age, too! I remember one day rushing to Mrs Stephens’ to get rid of them and their happiness. She was well off, and I don’t really know why she lived in such a street as ours. She kept two servants all for herself, and had a nice drawing-room on the first-floor very beautifully furnished, as I then thought, where she sat and saw all that was going on. Without Mrs Stephens I think I should have died. I used to rush to her when I could bear it no longer.
“What is the matter, Mary?” she would say, looking up from her Berlin work. She had a daughter who was married--and she was always working chairs for her, and footstools, and I don’t know what.
“Nothing,” said I, sitting down on the stool by her wool-basket and turning over the pretty colours; and then, after I had been silent for a minute, I said, “They have gone out for a walk.”
“It is very natural, my dear; you must not be jealous. It might be a question, you know, whether you liked your papa to marry; but now that he is married, it is his duty to be attentive to his wife.”
“He had me before he had a wife,” cried I; “why should he love her better than me? Why should he be so much happier with her than with me? He has always something to say to her: he is always smiling and pleasant. Sometimes with me he will be a whole day and never say a word. Why should he be more happy with her than with me?”
Mrs Stephens laughed. “I can’t tell you how it is, Mary, but so it is,” she said; “and by and by, when you are older, you will have somebody whom you will be happier with than you ever were with your papa. That is the best of being young. When my Sophy married, it was very hard upon me to see her happier with her husband than she had been with her mother, and to know that all that sort of thing was over for me, and that I must be content with my worsted-work. But you will have a happiness of your own by and by, when you are older; so you must not grudge it so much to your poor papa. I think he is looking pale. I thought he coughed a great deal on Sunday. Is she doing anything for that cough of his, do you know?”