"’Oh! my poor, dear, innocent lady!--whoever can have gone a-talking to you about such things! But, bless your heart! you believe an old woman, there ain’t no real badness in Master Frank. He always was a bit too fond perhaps of a pretty face, but then all of ’em is much the same. It is the girl’s fault, I reckon, nine times out of ten; and many’s the day I’ve had to bustle off some young minx of a housemaid, or maybe even a scullery wench, for the way they’d carry on, and he no more than a boy of fifteen! I ain’t got any patience, that I haven’t, with the girls of the present day! No self-respect, or keeping in their place. Why, I’ve even heard ’em a’quarrelling as to which he were fondest of, and which he had kissed last. But I soon had the hussies out of the house in those days! And I got pretty careful about the choice of their successors; they weren’t overdone with good looks the next lot, I can tell you! Well, you see, when a young man goes out like into the world, he has got to sow his wild oats a bit afore he settles down; but you take an old woman’s word for it, the young lord’s good at heart, and happy you’ll make me when I see the two of you together. Ay! and when I hold the young lord that is to be in these arms, as I did his father nigh on twenty-seven years ago!’ "After this manner and, as I got to know her better, in an even more familiar strain, did the old housekeeper do her best to alter my decision. Her arguments might have lacked logic, but she was a clever old thing in her way, and the love which she really felt for her young lord was more powerful than her justification of his faults. The stories of his childhood, picked doubtless out of many less attractive, were always in his favour, and showed his bravery, affection, and brightness. What, however, influenced me more than anything else were her pictures of the romantic side of married life, which differed entirely from anything I had been led to fancy. She would conclude a long rambling discourse on the subject in this manner-- "’Ah! little can you know what a woman misses as never has a chance of being loved--never can turn her mind back to the joys which come flocking down on a bride. Thanks be to heaven! I knowed it, though it weren’t for long. But when I looks at an old maid, why I feels just fit to cry. To have gone through life and not know nothing about it! Never to have felt that there was one man as loved you, and would have done anything to call you his own--to feel each year as it goes by that your chance is getting less of waking out of this sort of half-and-half existence, and beginning to live! It is just this. A girl as isn’t married ain’t natural; and things as ain’t natural ain’t good in no ways. We was told to be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and they as can and don’t, is to my mind going right dead against Scripture!’" *CHAPTER X*