"I will be patient,
not out of servility, but because I love my parents, and wish through
my perseverance, diligence, and success, to repay their anxieties and
tenderness for me." With this aid the least-deserved insult may
often be swallowed quite calmly, like a bitter pill with a draught of
fair water.

'I think you speak excellent sense when you say that girls without
fortune should be brought up and accustomed to support themselves;
and that if they marry poor men, it should be with a prospect of
being able to help their partners. If all parents thought so, girls
would not be reared on speculation with a view to their making
mercenary marriages; and, consequently, women would not be so
piteously degraded as they now too often are.

'Fortuneless people may certainly marry, provided they previously
resolve never to let the consequences of their marriage throw them as
burdens on the hands of their relatives. But as life is full of
unforeseen contingencies, and as a woman may be so placed that she
cannot possibly both "guide the house" and earn her livelihood (what
leisure, for instance, could Mrs. Williams have with her eight
children?), young artists and young governesses should think twice
before they unite their destinies.

'You speak sense again when you express a wish that Fanny were placed
in a position where active duties would engage her attention, where
her faculties would be exercised and her mind occupied, and where, I
will add, not doubting that my addition merely completes your
half-approved idea, the image of the young artist would for the
present recede into the background and remain for a few years to come
in modest perspective, the finishing point of a vista stretching a
considerable distance into futurity. Fanny may feel sure of this: if
she intends to be an artist's wife she had better try an
apprenticeship with Fortune as a governess first; she cannot undergo
a better preparation for that honourable (honourable if rightly
considered) but certainly not luxurious destiny.

'I should say then--judging as well as I can from the materials for
forming an opinion your letter affords, and from what I can thence
conjecture of Fanny's actual and prospective position--that you would
do well and wisely to put your daughter out. The experiment might do
good