To be a successful worker one must take the work which comes before one, and one must be trained to work, to punctuality, and to business habits; therefore, if there be one of the families of daughters no other nation produces in the reckless way our own does, it is imperative that the training to work begins in the nursery, and that the defenceless girls are given this equipment at least, even if the parents can do no more for them. The boys are born to work; they are carefully trained and brought up for this end, but there are hundreds of cases where the fathers have either been suddenly ruined or become poor through illness or their own selfishness, and who turn the girls out in their turn, and are much astonished when the poor things flounder hopelessly about and cannot keep themselves, because they have had absolutely no training which shall fit them for work. I feel, in writing this chapter, which concerns the girls of the household, that I cannot say too much about the subject of some provision being made for them, and that they should be relieved not only from the necessity of having to find a market for unskilled labour, but also from the trial of marrying if they do not want to do so, or if they do not see anyone they really love, because their parents are continually telling them it is their duty to marry in order to make room for their younger sisters. Now, incredible as it may sound to male ears, there are very many women to whom marriage and the obligations and responsibilities entailed thereby are absolutely distasteful and disagreeable. As a rule, these women make the best wives and house-mothers, but they are not the happiest people in the world, and would probably have been both happier and better had they followed out their own inclinations and lived their own lives in their own way, without the constant presence of a man and the unceasing cares of a household on their shoulders. They do not understand Love with a big L, and passion and they are strangers for ever, and always would be, but they marry at their parents’ request, to clear out the nest, and they certainly miss the higher happiness which, perchance, might have come had they waited, either from their work or from meeting the one individual who might have roused their sleeping souls and shown them a glimpse of the paradise that exists, I believe, for those lucky natures who understand what we may call the ‘Ouidaesque’ aspect of the case; albeit I also think they use up rapidly in that short sojourn in Paradise, which serves more sober-minded folk for the whole of life’s journey. For myself I cannot speak. I am a prosaic, unsentimental individual, and so far have got on without sentiment very well indeed; but other people may not be as I am, and may endure misery by marrying the first man who asks them because they see plainly how desperately they are grudged the room in the house which should have