"You can always do good, they tell us. I dare say; so can men; but how many among them would like to be recommended, as life occupation, to go making impertinent raids into poor people's houses to tell them they're untidy, when a family has but one room to live in, and there's but one water tap in the court, and two or three flights of stairs over which to carry every drop; or that they're ill-smelling, and will have fever, when an open drain and the dust bin are lodged just under the window, and somebody's great high wall cuts off every ray of sunshine; or that they don't know how to manage because they fare ill, when a half dozen people must keep life in them and some covering on them on fifteen shillings a week? Oh, I'm sick of it all! Look at mamma! She _lives_ in jails, up alleys, in soup kitchens and dispensaries, and we girls cut out and make up flannels, and knew about relief tickets before we could speak, and it's all just pouring water into a sieve! Mamma's always in agonies about some _protegee_ she's placed somewhere, who has absconded with the family plate and wardrobe. Her people are always getting drunk, fighting, or cheating her in some monstrous way. Her nicest girls run off with a strolling theatre company, or to dance in the ballet. There's no end to her miseries, and the people she spends her whole time, strength, and all the money she can spare and beg upon are not really much better off in the end. But even if they were? Mamma is mamma, and I am myself, and we're differing stars. No, I stick to my text. To be only a commonly contented married woman, with the shelter and freedom of a wife's position, with a house to keep, children and servants to look after, and with a certain amount of social influence, is better than to subside into a grim or fidgetty old maid in lodgings, with a dog and three-volume novels to get through the days and years with; to be snubbed and sneered at by men; to have, when one's hair is white as time can make it, the privilege of walking meekly out to dinner behind one's grand niece, a silly chit of eighteen, married a twelvemonth--and nobody to care whether one lives or dies, unless perhaps a Bath chair man. "Matrimony's the only career for women in England, but we ought to be trained for it on Gradgrind principles. As it is, we're far too aesthetic and sentimental for the mates we must have--if any. Poetry and the stories of fine, gracious, self-sacrificing lives ought to be suppressed; they're ruinous reading for this nineteenth century." And so on and on.