No wonder that your tall daughter turns red, stammers, and says foolish
things on being courteously spoken to by strangers at dinner, when she is
afraid that she may be sharply contradicted or interrupted, and remembers
that day before yesterday she was told that children should be seen and
not heard.
I knew a very clever girl, who had the misfortune to look at fourteen as
if she were twenty. At home, she was the shyest and most awkward of
creatures; away from her mother and sisters, she was self-possessed and
charming. She said to me, once, "Oh! I have such a splendid time away from
home. I'm so tall, everybody thinks I am grown up, and everybody is civil
to me."
I know, also, a man of superb physique, charming temperament, and uncommon
talent, who is to this day--and he is twenty-five years old--nervous and
ill at ease in talking with strangers, in the presence of his own family.
He hesitates, stammers, and never does justice to his thoughts. He says
that he believes he shall never be free from this distress; he cannot
escape from the recollections of the years between fourteen and twenty,
during which he was so systematically snubbed that his mother's parlor was
to him worse than the chambers of the Inquisition.
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