We often see this kind of helpless weakness in the daughter of a man of overbearing will, or of a termagant mother fond of managing and impatient of opposition. During the plastic time of her life, when education might perhaps have developed a sufficient amount of mental muscle, and a course of judicious moulding might have fairly set her up, she is snubbed and suppressed till all power is crushed out of her. She is taught the virtue of self-abnegation till she has no self to abnegate; and the backbone of her individuality is so incessantly broken that at last there is no backbone left in her to break. She has become a mere human mollusc which, when it loses its native shell, drifts helplessly at the mercy of chance currents into the maw of any stronger creature that may fancy it for his prey. One often sees these poor things left orphans and friendless at forty or fifty years of age. They have lived all their lives in leading-strings, and now are utterly unable to walk alone. They are infants in all knowledge of the world, of business, of human life; their youth is gone, and with it such beauty and attractiveness as they might have had, so that men who liked them when fresh and gentle at twenty do not care to accept their wrinkled helplessness at forty. They have been kept in and kept down, and so have made no friends of their own; and then, when the strong-willed father dies and the termagant mother goes to the place where the wicked cease from troubling, the mollusc these have hitherto protected is left defenceless and alone. If she has money, her chances of escape from the social sharks always on the look-out for fat morsels are very small indeed. It is well if she falls into no worse hands than those of legitimate priests of either section, whether enthusiastic for chasubles or crazy for missions; and if her money is put to no baser use than supplying church embroidery for some Brother Ignatius at home, or blankets for converted Africans in the tropics. It might go into Agapemones, into spiritual Athenæums, into Bond Street back-parlours, where it certainly would do no good, take it any way one would; for, as it must go into some side-channel dug by stronger hands than hers, the question is, into which of the innumerable conduits offered for the conveyance of superfluous means shall it be directed?