She had appeared in concerts for her father when a child. But when the father died, the girl was set to work in a dressmaking and millinery shop, to help support the big family. The mother didn't believe that women should be educated--it unfitted them for domesticity, and to speak of a woman as educated was to suggest that she was a poor housekeeper. In Greece of old, educated women were spoken of as "companions"--and this meant that they were not what you would call respectable. They were the intellectual companions of men. The Greek term of disrespect carried with it a trifle of a suggestion not intended, that is, that women who were not educated--not intellectual--were really not companionable--but let that pass. It is curious how this idea that a woman is only a scullion and a drudge has permeated society until even the women themselves partake of the prejudice against themselves. Mother Herschel didn't want her daughters to become educated, nor study the science of music nor the science of anything. A goodly grocer of the Dutch School had been picked out as a husband for Caroline, and now if she went away her prospects were ruined--Ach, Mein Gott! or words to that effect. And it was only on William's promise to pay the mother a weekly sum equal to the wages that Caroline received in the dressmaking-shop that she gave consent to her daughter's going. Caroline arrived in England, wearing wooden shoon and hoops that were exceeding Dutch, but without a word of English. In order to be of positive use to her brother, she must acquire English and be able to sing--not only sing well, but remarkably well. In less than a year she was singing solo parts at her brother's concerts, to the great delight of the aristocrats of Bath. They heard her sing, but they did not take her captive and submerge her in their fashionable follies as they would have liked to do.