Footsteps that are feigned never tread anything down; they leave no print, excepting in the heart that feigns them.
When Laura saw this place in the glen, she perceived plainly that there was no one with whom she might be humbly happy and poor--not even a plumber! This form of human sorrow--certainly one of the worst--is not half enough pitied by the happy.
Of course Laura was a fool--nobody claims for her that she was not; but fools are not rare, either male or female; as they arrange the world and its ways in great measure, it is odd that they do not understand one another better, and whether Laura showed her folly most or least in thinking that she could have been obscurely happy as the wife of a man who belonged to a different class of life from her own (she herself having small intellectual endowments, and but little culture), is a subject too vast, too overwhelming, for decision here; it ought to have a treatise in twelve volumes all to itself.
Mrs.Melcombe had come home also somewhat improved, but a good deal disappointed.

She had fully hoped and intended to marry again, because her son, who was to live to be old, would wish to marry early, and her future daughter-in-law would be mistress of the house.

It was desirable, therefore, that Peter's mother should not be dependent on him for a home.

She had twice been invited, while on the Continent, to change her name; but in each case it would have been, in a worldly point of view, very much to her disadvantage, and that was a species of second marriage that she by no means contemplated.

She did not want her second husband to take her that she might nurse him in his old age, fast approaching, and that he might live upon her income.
So she came home _Mrs.Melcombe_, and she continued to be kind to Laura, though she did not sympathize with her; and that was no fault of hers: sympathy is much more an intellectual than a moral endowment.