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There are many lives of much pain, hardship, and suffering, which,
having no stirring interest for any but those who lead them, are
disregarded by persons who do not want thought or feeling, but who
pamper their compassion and need high stimulants to rouse it.

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their
vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in
theirs; and hence it is that diseased sympathy and compassion are every
day expended on out-of-the-way objects, when only too many demands upon
the legitimate exercise of the same virtues in a healthy state, are
constantly within the sight and hearing of the most unobservant person
alive. In short, charity must have its romance, as the novelist or
playwright must have his. A thief in fustian is a vulgar character,
scarcely to be thought of by persons of refinement; but dress him in
green velvet, with a high-crowned hat, and change the scene of his
operations, from a thickly-peopled city, to a mountain road, and you
shall find in him the very soul of poetry and adventure. So it is with
the one great cardinal virtue, which, properly nourished and exercised,
leads to, if it does not necessarily include, all the others. It must
have its romance; and the less of real, hard, struggling work-a-day life
there is in that romance, the better.

The life to which poor Kate Nickleby was devoted, in consequence of the
unforeseen train of circumstances already developed in this narrative,
was a hard one; but lest the very dulness, unhealthy confinement, and
bodily fatigue, which made up its sum and substance, should deprive it
of any interest with the mass of the charitable and sympathetic, I would
rather keep Miss Nickleby herself in view just now, than chill them in
the outset, by a minute and lengthened description of the establishment
presided over by Madame Mantalini.

'Well, now, indeed, Madame Mantalini,' said Miss Knag, as Kate was
taking her weary way homewards on the first night of her novitiate;
'that Miss Nickleby is a very creditable young person--a very creditable
young person indeed--hem--upon my word, Madame Mantalini, it does very
extraordinary credit even to your discrimination that you should
have found such a very excellent, very well-behaved, very--hem--very
unassuming young woman to assist in the fitting on. I have seen some
young women when they had the opportunity of displaying before their
betters, beha