Life for the women was little better. If Madam could read and write it was as much as she could do. Whatever might have been the opinion of society in the Elizabethan era, undoubtedly, until but quite a few years ago, a learned woman was looked upon askance, and a gentleman--how the word is going out of use--ever feared that he might be thought to be in any way connected with trade. Even I can remember my grandmother saying to me that no gentleman wished to write a clear hand lest people should think he had been a clerk, and as for a woman very little reading and writing was good enough for her. Reading she regarded as “waste of time” for a woman, and my grandmother was born in the end of the eighteenth century and died an old, old woman in the last quarter of the nineteenth. She prided herself--with justice--on her courtly manners, and like one of Jane Austen's heroines, was a lady of leisure, never did I see her doing anything. She must have worked, for she was a poor woman and her house was nicely kept, but it would have been derogatory to allow even her granddaughter to see her sweeping or dusting, or cooking or washing up the crockery. I fear the ladies of the planters and their daughters had less education than even my grandmother would have thought necessary and the courtly manners were left out. If young Master made free with the better-looking negro wenches, or, as time went on, with the mulattoes and quadroons, it made life exceedingly dull for his sisters and his neighbours' sisters. Nay, more, it absolutely ruined their lives, and it was a cross they must bear with a smile, pretend indeed that it was a thing to which they never gave a thought. Yet these girls were brought up to think that marriage was the be-all and end-all of a woman's life. It was, of course. Nowadays, when most careers are open to her, it is hard on a girl if she may not have the hope of marrying, and she may marry any time between twenty and forty. But if she does not marry, she may still have an important place in the world. Then if she did not marry young she was at once counted a nonentity, she had little chance of marrying at all, her life must needs be empty and she had no standing in the world. And maturity comes so quickly in the tropics. Her time was so woefully short. Shorter than it was in the Old Country, and it was short enough there. “She had passed her first bloom,” writes Jane Austen on one occasion--and she meant it always--“she was nearly twenty.” If she had not a beau by the time she was sixteen, or were not married by eighteen or nineteen, a girl was branded as a failure, and I think there must have been many heart-burnings among the white women of Jamaica in these long ago days. The twentieth century has given women better fortune, taken away the bitterness that is the portion of the woman who, being as it were on show, is passed by as worthless.