The subject has a deep and painful interest for me."
That was all, and I had forgotten all about the conversation until some
time afterwards, when I had a letter from her recalling it. I quote one
passage without the alteration of a syllable:
"Oh, why did I not know before, when I was young, in the days when my
beautiful blue-eyed but cruel and remorseless mother and sisters made
my life an inexplicable grief and torment! It might have lifted the
black shadows from my youth by explaining the reason of their
persecutions - it might have taken the edge from my sufferings by
showing that I was not personally to blame, also that nothing could
ever obviate it, that I but wasted my life and broke my heart in for
ever vain efforts to appease an hereditary enemy and oppressor."
Cases of this kind cannot, however, appear conclusive. The cases in
which mother and daughters unite in persecuting a member of the family
are not uncommon. I have known several in my experience in which
respectable, well-to-do, educated, religious people have displayed a
perfectly fiendish animosity against one of the family. In all these
cases it has been mother and daughters combining against one daughter,
and so far as one can see into the matter, the cause is usually to be
traced to some strangeness or marked peculiarity, physical or mental,
in the persecuted one.
