The Gates Between by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

It ought to be said, at this point in my story, that I had never been what would be called an even-tempered man. Truth to tell, I was a spoiled boy. My mother was a saint, but she was a soft-hearted one. My father was a scholar. Like many another boy of decided individuality, I came up anyhow. Nobody managed me. At an early age my profession made it my duty to manage everybody else. I had a nervous temperament to start on; neither my training nor my occupation had poised it. I do not think I was malicious nor even ill-natured. As men go, I was perhaps a kind man. The thing which I am trying to say is, that I was an irritable one.

As I look back upon the whole subject I can see, from my present point of view, that this irritability had seldom struck me as a personal disadvantage. I do not think it usually makes that impression upon temperaments similarly vitiated. As nearly as I can remember, I thought of myself rather as the possessor of an eccentricity, than as the victim of a vice. My father was an overworked college professor, -- a quick-tempered man; my mother, -- so he told me with streaming tears, upon the day that he buried her, -- my mother never spoke one irritated word to him in all her life: he had chafed and she had soothed, he had slashed and she had healed, from the beginning to the end of their days together. A boy imitates for so many years before he reflects, that the liberty to say what one felt like saying appeared to me a mere identification of sex long before it occurred to me that mine might not be the only sex endowed by nature with this form of expression.