Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/151



at Edgeworthstown underwent no outward change owing to the death of its master. His place was taken by his eldest and unmarried son Lovell, who sought, to the best of his abilities, to keep the house a home for his father's widow and his numerous brothers and sisters, an endeavour in which he was successful. Miss Edgeworth describes herself at this time as "quite absorbed in low domestic interests, of which only those who love home and love us can possibly bear to hear.'

For some years after her father's death all she did was done as an effort, and more from a high sense of duty and from the thought that it would have pleased him who was gone, than from any inner desire to act. When the family, after a short absence, reassembled at Edgeworthstown, it required all her inherited activity of mind, all her acquired self-command, to enable her to keep up her spirits on re-entering that house in which for her the light was quenched. It was well for her not only that work was the purpose in life of all that family, that no drones were suffered in that household, but that her