ong as we
retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless,
blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is
becoming to me among the rest.

"Nobody," she went on--"nobody in particular is to blame, that I can
see, for the state in which things are; and I cannot tell, however much
I puzzle over it, how they are to be altered for the better; but I feel
there is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have
more to do--better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than
they possess now. And when I speak thus I have no impression that I
displease God by my words; that I am either impious or impatient,
irreligious or sacrilegious. My consolation is, indeed, that God hears
many a groan, and compassionates much grief which man stops his ears
against, or frowns on with impotent contempt. I say _impotent_, for I
observe that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure it
usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn, this scorn being only a
sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be
reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy. Such reminder,
in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful
sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their
ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless
and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the
world; the demand disturbs the happy and rich--it disturbs parents. Look
at the numerous families of girls in this neighbourhood--the Armitages,
the Birtwhistles, the Sykeses. The brothers of these girls are every one
in business or in professions; they have something to do. Their sisters
have no earthly employment but household work and sewing, no earthly
pleasure but an unprofitable visiting, and no hope, in all their life to
come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them
decline in health. They are never well, and their minds and views shrink
to wondrous narrowness. The great wish, the sole aim of every one of
them is to be married, but the majority will never marry; they will die
as they now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare
husbands. The gentlemen turn them into ridicule; they don't want them;
they hold them very cheap. They say--I have heard them say it with
sneering laughs many a time--the matrimonial market is overstocked.
Fathers say so likewise, and are angry wi