hite a terrible blow in
Holland and Germany. But some copies of the printed books were usually
illuminated and fettered. The printers offered Margaret prices for work
in these two kinds.

"I'll think on't," said she.

She took down her diurnal book, and calculated that the price of an
hour's work on those arts would be about one-fifth what she got for an
hour at the tub and mangle. "I'll starve first," said she; "what, pay a
craft and a mystery five times less than a handicraft!"

Martin, carrying the dry clothes-basket, got treated, and drunk. This
time he babbled her whole story. The girls got hold of it and gibed her
at the fountain.

All she had gone through was light to her, compared with the pins and
bodkins her own sex drove into her heart, whenever she came near the
merry crew with her pitcher, and that was every day. Each sex has its
form of cruelty; man's is more brutal and terrible; but shallow women,
that have neither read nor suffered, have an unmuscular barbarity of
their own (where no feeling of sex steps in to overpower it). This
defect, intellectual perhaps rather than moral, has been mitigated in
our day by books, especially by able works of fiction; for there are
two roads to the highest effort of intelligence, Pity; Experience of
sorrows, and Imagination, by which alone we realize the grief we
never felt. In the fifteenth century girls with pitchers had but one;
Experience; and at sixteen years of age or so, that road had scarce been
trodden. These girls persisted that Margaret was deserted by her lover.
And to be deserted was a crime (They had not been deserted yet.) Not a
word against the Gerard they had created out of their own heads. For the
imaginary crime they fell foul of the supposed victim. Sometimes they
affronted her to her face. Oftener they talked at her backwards and
forwards with a subtle skill, and a perseverance which, "oh, that they
had bestowed on the arts," as poor Aguecheek says.

Now Margaret was brave, and a coward; brave to battle difficulties and
ill fortune; brave to shed her own blood for those she loved. Fortitude
she had. But she had no true fighting courage. She was a powerful young
woman, rather tall, full, and symmetrical; yet had one of those slips
of girls slapped her face, the poor fool's hands would have dropped
powerless, or gone to her own eyes instead of her adversary's. Nor was
she even a match for so many tongues; and besides, what could she say?
She kne