e she can see them
every Sunday, to be passed some day unnoticed in the street, or
deliberately cut because the great man or the great woman are with
friends before whom they are ashamed to recognise the old woman that
loved them.

When she goes home that night, how lonely will the room appear to her!
Perhaps the neighbours may hear her sobbing to herself in the dark, with
the fire burnt out for want of fuel, and the candle still unlit upon the
table.

And it is for this that they live, these quasi-mothers--mothers in
everything but the travail and the thanks. It is for this that they have
remained virtuous in youth, living the dull life of a household servant.
It is for this that they refused the old sweetheart, and have no
fireside or offspring of their own.

I believe in a better state of things, that there will be no more
nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own offspring; for what can
be more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest
feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as long as you
need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and
then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for
them is at an end? This may be Utopian; but it is always a little thing
if one mother or two mothers can be brought to feel more tenderly to
those who share their toil and have no part in their reward.

V

A CHARACTER

The man has a red, bloated face, and his figure is short and squat. So
far there is nothing in him to notice, but when you see his eyes, you
can read in these hard and shallow orbs a depravity beyond measure
depraved, a thirst after wickedness, the pure, disinterested love of
Hell for its own sake. The other night, in the street, I was watching an
omnibus passing with lit-up windows, when I heard some one coughing at
my side as though he would cough his soul out; and turning round, I saw
him stopping under a lamp, with a brown greatcoat buttoned round him and
his whole face convulsed. It seemed as if he could not live long; and so
the sight set my mind upon a train of thought, as I finished my cigar up
and down the lighted streets.

He is old, but all these years have not yet quenched his thirst for
evil, and his eyes still delight themselves in wickedness. He is dumb;
but he will not let that hinder his foul trade, or perhaps I should say,
his yet fouler amusement, and he has pressed a slate into the service of
corruption