Heaven help me! I am satisfied with the world, and with my own fellow-creatures, as our Lord has been pleased to make them.

I cannot endure that people should be perpetually blaming, and criticising, and mocking, and making sour faces at everything, and saying 'I will not have this!' and 'I will not have that!' and 'I will not have it so! It is folly; it is unbearable; it is wearisome; it is stupid!' precisely as if they themselves only were endurable, agreeable, and clever! No, I have learned better manners than that.

It is true that I have no genius, nor learning, nor talents, as so many people in our day lay claim to, but I have learned to govern myself!" During this moral lecture, and endeavouring all the time to overpower it, the Assessor exclaimed, "And can you derive the least pleasure from your blessed social life?
No, that you cannot! What is social life, but a strift to get into the world in order to discover that the world is unbearable?
but a scheming and labouring to get invited, to be offended and put out of sorts if not invited; and if invited, then to complain of weariness and vexation, and thus utter their lamentations.

Thus people bring a mass of folks together, and wish them--at Jericho! and all this strift only to get poorer, more out of humour, more out of health; in one word, to obtain the perfectly false position, _vis-a-vis_, of happiness! See there! Adieu, adieu! When the ladies take leave, they never have done." "There is not one single word of truth in all that you have said," was the last but laughing salutation of Mrs.Gunilla to the Assessor, as, accompanied by the Candidate, she left the door.

The Judge, too, was gone; and Elise, left alone, betook herself to the parlour.
Suddenly quick steps were heard behind her--she thought "Jacobi"-- turned round, and saw her husband; but never before had she seen him looking as then; there was an excitement, an agitation, in his countenance that terrified her.