Whether people will ever learn the uselessness of such efforts is yet a matter for prophecy. Miss Hyde heard all that was said, and replied very quietly, "I don't believe it." And as Mrs. Perkins had no tangible proofs of Abner Dimock's unfitness to marry Judge Hyde's daughter, the lady in question got the better of her adviser, so far as any argument was concerned, and effectually put an end to remonstrance by declaring with extreme quiet and unblushing front,-- "I am going to marry him next week. Will you be so good as to notify Mr. Perkins?" Mrs. Perkins held up both hands and cried. Words might have hardened Hitty; but what woman that was not half tigress ever withstood another woman's tears? Hitty's heart melted directly; she sat down by Mrs. Perkins, and cried, too. "Please, don't be vexed with me," sobbed she. "I love him, Mrs. Perkins, and I haven't got anybody else to love,--and--and--I never shall have. He's very good to love me,--I am so old and homely." "Very good!" exclaimed Mrs. Perkins, in great wrath, "_good_! to marry Judge Hyde's daughter, and--fifty thousand dollars," Mrs. Perkins bit off. She would not put such thoughts into Hitty's head, since her marriage was inevitable. "At any rate," sighed Hitty, on the breath of a long-drawn sob, "nobody else ever loved me, if I am Judge Hyde's daughter." So Mrs. Perkins went away, and declared that things had gone too far to be prevented; and Abner Dimock came on her retreating steps, and Hitty forgot everything but that he loved her; and the next week they were married. Here, by every law of custom, ought my weary pen to fall flat and refuse its office; for it is here that the fate of every heroine culminates. For what are women born but to be married? Old maids are excrescences in the social system,--disagreeable utilities,--persons who have failed to fulfil their destiny,--and of whom it should have been said, rather than of ghosts, that they are always in the wrong. But life, with pertinacious facts, is too apt to transcend custom and the usage of novel-writers; and though the one brings a woman's legal existence to an end when she merges her independence in that of a man, and the other curtails her historic existence at the same point, because the novelist's catechism hath for its preface this creed,--"The chief end of woman is to get married"; still, neither law nor novelists altogether displace this same persistent fact, and a woman lives, in all capacities of suffering and happiness, not only her wonted, but a double life, when legally and religiously she binds herself with bond and vow to another soul.