And now, reluctantly and regretfully, I must say farewell to those with whom I have conversed so long in these pages. I feel this book has not the light-hearted gaiety with which Angelina and Edwin plan out their newly-married life, and with which they start out to furnish their little home, in ‘From Kitchen to Garret;’ but if I am more serious here it is because life grows more serious as one grows older, as one realises how much there is to do and how difficult it is to steer the bark freighted with one’s growing-up children, and with more money to be spent judiciously, a larger house to be managed, so that we may do as much good as we possibly can, so that it may give as much happiness to as many as can be managed, and in some measure so exist as to leave the world immediately within its influence just a little bit better than we found it. We must realise, wherever we are, that we influence someone, perhaps very many people, either for good or for evil. It is no use to bury our heads in the sand, and pretend that no one need be influenced by us unless they like, and that it is not our fault if they are. It is our fault, and we cannot get rid of our responsibility in this way; while if we boldly accept our fate, and do our duty manfully, we shall have our reward, more especially if we endeavour not to know the ‘best’ people because we crave for social exaltation, and to mix with those who resent our intrusion and laugh at our pretensions, but to associate with those whose noble minds and good thoughts and bright intellects will help our own, and assist us on our mental progress through the world; and to have as friends, not those who can give us dinner for dinner, ball for ball, but those to whom we can give pleasure they would never have did we refuse to open our doors to them, and to those whose large hearts and brilliant minds influence ours for good, and lead us insensibly along a path of peace and safety. The truest socialism should begin in the perfect home; the socialism which shares or administers but does not disperse or destroy; the socialism which opens the park gates to the poor, or the picture-galleries to those who could never see anything were it not for the action of the owner, that never receives a benefit without in some measure sharing it with a poorer brother, and that finally has a noble end in life; nay, the noblest of all, that of leaving the world a little better for one’s having lived and loved and worked and suffered in it.