These might be afforded by their father so long as his annual gains
continued large. But the many worthy young men who visited and admired
them refused to entertain the idea of marriage with girls whose mere
personal outfit cost a sum equal to the year's salary of a first-class
clerk, or the annual profits of one who had just commenced business for
himself. They held that the girl whose habits were so expensive should
bring with her a fortune large enough to support them, or remain as she
was, taking the sure consequences on her own shoulders, and not throwing
them on theirs. They were in fact afraid of girls who manifestly had no
prudence, no economy, and who appeared to be wholly unconscious that the
only admiration worth securing is that of the good and wise.

But the vices of the old mode of living clung to them in their new and
humbler abode, keeping them slaves to a new set of appearances. They had
never done any work of consequence, hardly their own sewing. What was
even worse, they had been brought up to consider work, for a lady,
disgraceful. Women might work, but not ladies; or when the latter
undertook it, they ceased to be such, and certainly so, if working for a
living. No pride could have been more tyrannous or absurd than this.
For a whole year after their father's death, it ruled them with despotic
supremacy. They prided themselves on doing nothing, and subsisted on the
sale of trinkets, jewelry, and books, which they had acquired in palmier
days. The circle of acquaintances for whose good opinion they submitted
to these humiliating sacrifices knew all the while that the life they
were living was a sham; but they themselves seemed wholly unconscious of
it, as well as of the light in which it was regarded by those about
them.

Why should such a woman come to a school like this, where a willingness
to work was a condition of admission, and that work to be done in
public? What could bring about so strange a reversal of thought and
habit? One of her sisters had recently died, after a protracted illness,
during which her heart had been mercifully smitten with a conviction of
the hollowness and sinfulness of her previous life. Its idle, trifling,
aimless tendency had been set before her in all its emptiness. She saw
that she had been living without God, bound up in the love of temporal
things, and so effectually ensnared by worldly pride that her whole fear
had been of man, instead of her Creator. Thus in merc