Explore "The Whole Family" by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
We start in life with the most preposterous of all human claims -- that one should be understood. We get bravely over that after awhile; but not until the idea has been knocked out of us by the hardest. I used to worry a good deal, myself, because nobody -- distinctly not one person -- in our family understood me; that is, me in my relation to themselves; nothing else, of course, mattered so much. But that was before I was married. I think it was because Tom understood me from the very first eye-beam, that I loved him enough to marry him and learn to understand HIM. I always knew in my heart that he had the advantage of me in that beautiful art: I suppose one might call it the soul-art. At all events, it has been of the least possible consequence to me since I had Tom, whether any one else in the world understood me or not.
I suppose -- in fact, I know -- that it is this unfortunate affair of Peggy's which has brought up all that old soreness to the surface of me.