Alas, she thought, with what upright intentions may we be injudicious! I have thrown away the power of obliging, by too precipitate an eagerness to oblige! I retain merely that of avoiding to displease, by my most indefatigable application! All I can perform seems but a duty, and of course; all I leave undone, seems idleness and neglect. Yet what is the labour that never requires respite? What the mind, that never demands a few poor unshackled instants to itself? From this time, the little pleasure which she had been able to create for herself, from the virtue of her exertions, was at an end: to toil beyond her fellow-labourers, was but to provoke ill will; to allow herself any repose, was but to excite disapprobation. Hopeless, therefore, either way, she gave, with diligence, her allotted time to her occupation, but no more: all that remained, she solaced, by devoting to her pen and Gabriella, with whom her correspondence,--her sole consolation,--was unremitting. This unaffected conduct had its customary effect; it destroyed at once the too hardly earned favour of Mrs Hart, and the illiberal, yet too natural enmity of her apprentices; and, in the course of a very few days, Juliet was neither more esteemed, nor more censured, than any of her sisters of the sewing tribe. With the energy, however, of her original wishes and efforts, died all that could reconcile her to this sort of life. The hope of pleasing, which alone could soften its hardships, thus forcibly set aside, left nothing in its place, but calmness without contentment; dulness without serenity. Experience is not more exclusively the guide of our judgment, than comparison is the mistress of our feelings. Juliet now also found that, local publicity excepted, there was nothing to prefer in her new to her former situation; and something to like less. The employment itself was by no means equally agreeable for its disciples. The taste and fancy, requisite for the elegance and variety of the light work which she had quitted; however ineffectual to afford pleasure when called forth by necessity, rendered it, at least, less irksome, than the wearying sameness of perpetual basting, running, and hemming. Her fellow-labourers, though less pert and less obtrusive than those which she had left, had the same spirit for secret cabal, and the same passion for frolic and disguise; and also, like those, were all prattle and confidential sociability, in the absence of the mistress; all sullenness and taciturnity, in her presence. What little difference, therefore, she found in her position, was, that there she had been disgusted by under-bred flippancy; here, she was deadened by uninteresting monotony; and that there, perpetual motion, and incessant change of orders, and of objects, affected her nerves; while here, the unvarying repetition of stitch after stitch, nearly closed in sleep her faculties, as well as her eyes.