Here, too, I met again the tall, thin young lady, heroine of the device for frightening small bores--the Plymouth Sister's daughter. We talked of a good many things, but chiefly of marriage, and the position of unmarried women in England. The girl was as simply frank as a child. Matrimony, and matrimony alone, offered any career to women in England. And upon Mrs. Stainton's saying that despite her own perfect marriage--a marriage for love, and the union so entire that there lurked no shadowy region in her soul of which she could not make her husband as free as herself to enter--yet all that she had seen of life made her feel sure that, beyond a few rare exceptions, it mattered not, ten years after marriage, whether the match had been for love solely, or arranged, or a _mariage de convenance_, the girl assented; somewhat bitterly remarked that ideals were very well for a heroic life, but terrible drawbacks in the world of to-day, and that any woman would do better for herself to accept any reasonably suitable offer than to cling to an impossible dream, or insist upon a great amount of sentiment. "It ought to be enough," said this girl of the period, "for a woman to be able to decently respect a man who has the means of placing her in such conditions as she thinks will suit her. And men do very well without sentiment. They have their professions, their business, their friends, their clubs. It is quite enough for them if their wives are fairly good housekeepers and mothers, presentable at head of their tables, pleasant hostesses in their drawing-rooms. It sounds very mean, but what is a girl to do? We may be most of us clever enough and tolerably well educated, but there are not among us many brilliant geniuses who can find all comfort and happiness in a life devoted, wholly to art or literature. What is one of the mediocre mass to do? It's not genteel to do this, it's unfeminine to do that; one can't stir in any direction that would have in it some spirit, some earnest, something worth while.