“Well,” said Edgar, “we are not criticising, we are merely taking facts as we find them. If it amuses the ladies to turn the things over, the men in the shops are really more useful to them than the other men who go to their five o’clock tea. And now and then there comes a _bona fide_ purchaser. Whereas for you young ladies what could be better? trying on pretty shawls and things (I saw them), exercising the highest qualities of self-denial, making your prettiness and gracefulness of use to others, and yet having your time to yourselves say after six or seven o’clock. You would see the best of company all the same, _par dessus la marché_. Don’t you think it would be a very pleasant change?” “If you would treat it seriously, and really consider how little women are allowed to do, Mr. Arden,” cried Helena Thornleigh, who was too much in earnest to encourage mere chatter like her sisters. “I am sure you might be a great help to us. _You_ see what a desert our lives are, with no object in them. You see what vapid, aimless, useless creatures the most of us are----” “I beg your pardon,” said Edgar. “I feel that it is frightfully selfish, but all my sympathies, in the first place, are for my own class. Stop till I have made that out. I will come to the ladies by-and-bye. We never have a moment’s time for anything; we are always pursued by work which has to be done, whether it is riding in the park, or going to the opera, or dining at Richmond. How stern duty runs after your brother, for instance, always reminding him of some engagement or other. Poor Harry finds it a dreadful bore. He says so, and he ought to know best. He is always bemoaning his hard fate, and yet he always goes on obeying it. I don’t object to routine, and I don’t object to suffering. They are both good things enough; but to suffer and be a slave to routine all for nothing is very hard--I confess I think it is very hard. To be sure, Harry need not do it unless he likes; but that he should like, and should go on doing it, and should not be able to find something better, that is what puzzles me.” “I say,” said Harry, who was half-dozing over a book, “what is that about me? I don’t want to be made to point a moral in this house. The girls turn me to that use fast enough. What is Arden saying now?” “Nothing that is very remarkable,” said Edgar; “only that we poor fellows, or you poor fellows, don’t get half enough credit for the hard life you lead. You give yourselves as much trouble as if you were founding a state or reforming society, and all the time you are doing nothing. I don’t object to it. If a man likes to spend his life so, why, of course, he is free to do it: he is a British subject like the rest of us. But I want to know who invented this theory of existence, and how men were got to give in to it--that is all.”