He was glad, moreover, to know that she made an admirable mother to the little woman-child.

Prudence, indeed, had brought them closer to each other, slowly, subtly, in little ways to disarm the most timid caution.
And this mothering and fathering of little Prudence was a work by no means colourless or uneventful.

The child had displayed a grievous capacity for remaining unimpressed by even the best-weighed opinions of her protector.

She was also appallingly fluent in and partial to the idioms and metaphors of revealed religion,--a circumstance that would not infrequently cause the sensitive to shudder.
Thus, when she chose to call her largest and least sightly doll the Holy Ghost, the ingenuity of those about her was taxed to rebuke her in ways that would be effective without being harsh.

It was felt, too, that her offence had been but slightly mitigated when she called the same doll, thereafter, "Thou son of perdition and shedder of innocent blood." Not until this disfigured effigy became Bishop Wright, and the remaining dolls his more or less disobedient wives, was it felt that she had approached even remotely the plausible and the decorous.
A glance at some of the verses she was from time to time constrained to learn will perhaps indicate the line of her transgressions, and yet avert a disclosure of details that were often tragic.