And so the littlest was Hortense Dehning. She too had the stamp of the fair prosperous woman who had set her seal so firmly on her children, but little Hortense had perhaps a little more in her of that sweet good woman who had born many children and then had died away and left them for that was all she knew then to do for them.
     The little Hortense Dehning was not of much importance yet in the family living. Hortense was ten now and full of adoration for her big sister and yet most of all for her brother. She was not very strong and she could not run after him in his playing, but sometimes he would sit and talk to her about himself and his resolutions and the elaborated purposes that he was always losing. George was always very moral and too he was very hopeful. He always began his to-morrow with himself full of a firm resolution to do all things every minute and to do them all very complicatedly. George felt always he must bring up this little sister for he George was the only one who knew the right ways for her.
     And so he preached a great deal to her, and little Hortense was very devout and adored her instructor. There was always a dependent loyal up-gazing sweetness in her.
     Being the baby of the family she was much petted by her father and always she was overawed by her brother, who was very careful to be noble to her. She was not just then very much with her mother for she was not at this time very important to her. The mother was so busy with her Julia, to find an important and good husband for her. And so little Hortense was left much to her brother and to the governess they had for her.
     For us now as well as for the mother the important matter in the history of the Dehning family is the marrying of Julia. I have said that a strong family likeness bound all the three children firmly to their mother. That fair good-looking prosperous woman had stamped her image on each one of her children, but with only the eldest Julia was the stamp deep, deeper than for the fair good-looking exterior.
     All the family had always looked up to Julia. They delighted in her daring and in a kind of heroical sweetness there was in her. They respected in her, her educated ways and her knowing always what was the right way she and all of them should be doing. It was not for nothing she was a crude domineering virgin. And she was strong in the success she knew always that she had inside her, and the family always admired and followed after.
     Her father loved her energy and vigor, he loved her happiness and the ardent honest feeling in her. He was always very ready to yield to her, he liked to hear her when she explained to him in her quick decisive manner the new faith she had so strongly in her, the new illusions and the theories and new movements that the spirit of her generation had taught to her. And he laughed at her new fangled notions and her educated literary business and all her modern kinds of improvements as he called them, and he abused them and too the way she had of believing that she knew more than her mother, but always it amused the father to have his bright quick daughter explain all these new ways to him. Mr. Dehning knew well the value of what he had learned by living, but his was a nature generous in its feeling and he was always ready to listen to his children when they could fairly demonstrate their ideas to him.
     But Herman Dehning's pride and pleasure in his Julia was all exceeded by the loud voiced satisfaction of the mother to whom this brilliant daughter always seemed as the product of the mother's own exertions. In her it was the vanity and exultation of creation as well as of possession and she never fairly learned how completely it was the girl who governed all the family life and how very much of this young life was hidden from her knowledge.
     Mr.