Oliver observed that the girls had none of the sustained industry of Fan, and that they were constantly seeking to shirk the share of work in the shop and house which their mother laid upon them. ’Mily was particularly adroit in slipping off her burdens, and her active mother made more allowance for ’Mily’s adroitness than for ’Liza’s laziness or Ann’s slowness, showing that she considered rebellion incidental to youth, and admired in this case the cleverness with which it was carried out. Mrs. Polley said her youngest was ‘a sad pickle,’ but she admitted she had been thoughtless and fond of her pleasure beyond everything in her own girlhood. She daresayed a house and family on ’Mily’s refractory shoulders would steady her in time. She would rather have a girl smart for her own ends than a silly or a dawdle, any day; so far from regarding the smartness thus exercised as dishonourable to the culprit, Mrs. Polley saw in it a proof that ’Mily would be worth something in the end. The household needlework, which is still done at home in houses like the Polleys’, was another task which the girls evaded, or discharged, with a grudge, in the most slovenly fashion. Such disgraceful needlework, to be worn in private, as the Polleys passed through their clumsy, careless fingers, Fan Constable would not have accepted from the least scholar in the vicar’s wife’s school. It puzzled Oliver that Mrs. Polley, who insisted so strongly on the merits of energy and enterprise in her own case, could, as a matter of principle, permit the comparatively useless, frivolous lives her daughters led. But when he sounded her one day on whether she did not approve of training girls to self-help, as fit successors to their fathers and mothers in such a shop as she herself conducted successfully, he found, strange as it seemed to him, that she too, was tinged with the girls’ views of gentility. Oliver, who had thought to have pleased his father’s old friend by the suggestion, had never gone so near to sending her off in a huff—and Mrs. Polley in a huff was a formidable person to have to do with. ‘Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, with a dry cough, ‘my gals don’t ought to look forward to going into the shop. I haven’t toiled my shoulders and my ’ead, and stood there till I was fit to drop on market-days, for my gals to have to follow in my shoes. If business goes with us as it has done, I’m ’appy to say, ever since I took it in hand, I expect I shall put enough by to enable the gals, if they ain’t provided with husbands in the meantime, to live on their means, and do nothing, like the best in the place.’ Oliver was silenced.