Look tenderly, reader, on this picture of struggles so small, of sufferings so uninteresting and mean. I paint it not because it is original, but because it is so awfully true. Thousands of women, well born, well reared, know it to be true--burned into them by the cruel conflict of their youth; happy they if it ended in their youth, while mind and body had still enough vitality and elasticity to endure! I paint it, because it accounts for the accusation sometimes made--especially by men--that women are naturally stingy. Possibly so: but in many instances may it not have been this petty struggle with petty wants this pitiful calculating of penny against penny, how best to save here and spend there, which narrows a woman's nature in spite of herself? It sometimes takes years of comparative ease and freedom from pecuniary cares to counteract the grinding, lowering effects of a youth of poverty. And I paint this picture, too, literally, and not on its picturesque side--it, indeed, poverty has a picturesque side--in order to show another side which it really has--high, heroic, made up of dauntless endurance, self sacrifice, and self control Also, to indicate that blessing which narrow circumstances alone bestow, the habit of looking more to the realities than to the shows of things, and of finding pleasure in enjoyments mental rather than sensuous, inward rather than external. When people can truly recognize this they cease either to be afraid or ashamed of poverty. Hilary was not ashamed:--not even now, when hers smote sharper and harder than it had ever done at Stowbury. She felt it a sore thing enough; but it never humiliated nor angered her. Either she was too proud or not proud enough; but her low estate always seemed to her too simply external a thing to affect her relations with the world outside. She never thought of being annoyed with the shopkeeper, who, though he trusted her with the sixpence, carefully took down her name and address: still less to suspecting the old lady opposite, who sat and listened to the transaction--apparently a well-to-do customer, clad in a rich black silk and handsome sable furs--of looking down upon her and despising her. She herself never despised any body, except for wickedness. So she waited contentedly, neither thinking of herself, nor of what others thought of her; but with her mind quietly occupied by the two thoughts, which in any brief space of rest always recurred, calming down all annoyances, and raising her above the level of petty pains--Johanna and Robert Lyon. Under the influence of these her tired face grew composed, and there was a wishful, far away, fond look in her eyes, which made it not wonderful that the said old lady--apparently an acute old soul in her way--should watch her, as we do occasionally watch strangers in whom we have become suddenly interested.