Anthony Trollope

The Courtship of Susan Bell Anthony Trollope

In the first place the widow was a timid woman, and among other fears feared greatly that she should be thought guilty of setting traps for husbands. Poor mothers! how often are they charged with this sin when their honest desires go no further than that their bairns may be "respectit like the lave." And then she feared flirtations; flirtations that should be that and nothing more, flirtations that are so destructive of the heart's sweetest essence. She feared love also, though she longed for that as well as feared it;-for her girls, I mean; all such feelings for herself were long laid under ground;-and then, like a timid creature as she was, she had other indefinite fears, and among them a great fear that those girls of hers would be left husbandless, -a phase of life which after her twelve years of bliss she regarded as anything but desirable. But the upshot was, -the upshot of so many fears and such small means, -that Hetta and Susan Bell had but a dull life of it.