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22 her greatly. On the one side were all the nuns, who were constantly telling her that the joys of the world were but fleeting pleasures, and that her mind ought to be fastened securely upon heavenly things. On the other side were her natural youthful feelings, leading her to shrink before the prospect of giving up forever the innocent pleasures and beauties of God’s earthly world. The child was motherless, and had no friend she could trust. Marriage, now that her first love-affair was ended,—for nothing is heard of her early love again,—seemed like slavery, and it was a slavery without the approval of her conscience, taught as she had been by the nuns to believe that matrimony was not an honorable estate. Thus, between Scylla and Charybdis, slavery and isolation, the poor girl stood; and we do not wonder that her troubled mental state worked upon her nerves, and her nerves upon her body, and that she soon became too ill to make any decision herself. Before her second year at the convent was ended, her father had to be requested to take her home; then began a long period of