It was in all things alike. The Scratchells were never permitted to make any mistake as to their place in the social scale. It was to be a subordinate place always. They were to work for their bread, as their father had done before them, as their mother worked daily, from sunrise to sunset, in homely drudgery that made no effect or impression upon the world, and left nothing behind when life was done, not so much as an embroidered chair cover, or a thin volume of indifferent verses, to be admired by the next generation. They were to work, these young Scratchells. Their education was not given to them for its own sake--on the sweetness and light principle--but as a preparation for a laborious career. Herbert was to be apprenticed to Mr. Pontorson, the surveyor at Great Yafford. Adolphus--poor Mrs. Scratchell had insisted upon giving her children the cheap luxury of fine names--was promised a clerkship in a factory. Isabella was already earning a salary as morning governess to the little Pipers at Yafford Park. It was not an onerous engagement, and left her afternoons free. Mr. Scratchell thought she ought to get another engagement to fill up her afternoons, but as yet Isabella had contrived to avoid this double labour. She was her father’s favourite, and was believed to have great influence over him. It was she who was always charged with the task of imparting any disagreeable intelligence to him, such as the kitchen boiler having cracked, the supply of coals being nearly run out, or Adolphus having broken ‘another window.’ The previous fracture on this wretched youth’s part was always so recent as to exaggerate the iniquity of the present offence. It was scarcely strange, perhaps, if from this Spartan training the little Scratchells grew up with the idea that poverty was life’s chief evil. Just as the Stoics believed virtue to be the only good, the young Scratchells believed want of money to be the only ill. ‘Ah, my dears, a fat sorrow is better than a lean sorrow,’ Mrs. Scratchell remarked, plaintively, when she heard of the afflictions of her wealthier neighbours. She could not bring herself even to pity her husband’s patron, Mr. Harefield, who was supposed to have had his heart broken by the untimely death of his handsome wife. It seemed to her impossible that so rich a man, surrounded with all the good things of this life, could be an object for compassion.