He denied that sewing would affect his daughters' health, unless, perhaps, they followed it exclusively as an occupation; but, as they would have it in their power to consult their inclinations and convenience in this matter, they might take it up when the occasion required, and lay it down whenever they found it irksome or fatiguing: that as they themselves were inclined to follow this course, it was a plain proof that the occupation was not unhealthy. He maintained that they would stoop just as much in gardening, and washing and nursing their children, as in sewing; and that we were not such frail or unpliant machines as to be seriously injured, unless we persisted in one set of straight, formal notions, but that we were adapted to variety, and were benefited by it. That as to the practice being favourable to wantonness and vice, while he admitted that idleness was productive of these effects, he could not see how one occupation encouraged them more than another. That the tailor, for example, whom he had been speaking of, though purse-proud, overbearing, and rapacious, was not more immoral or depraved than his neighbours, and had probably less of the libertine than most of them. He admitted that evil thoughts would enter the mind in any situation, and could not reasonably be expected to be kept out of his daughters' heads (being, as he said, but women): yet he conceived such a result as far less probable, if they were suffered to ramble about in the streets, and to chaffer with their customers, than if they were kept to sedate and diligent employment at home. Having, with great warmth and earnestness, used these arguments, he concluded, by plainly hinting to his wife that she had always been the apologist of the tailor, in all their disputes; and that she could not be so obstinately blind to the irrefragable reasoning he had urged, if she were not influenced by her old hankering after this fellow, and did not consult his interests in preference to those of her own family. Upon this remark the old woman took fire, and, in spite of our presence, they both had recourse to direct and the coarsest abuse.