n which no human being can believe! Such is the
theory of the censors who deal heavily with our Englishwomen of
the present day. Our daughters should be educated to be wives, but,
forsooth, they should never wish to be wooed! The very idea is but a
remnant of the tawdry sentimentality of an age in which the mawkish
insipidity of the women was the reaction from the vice of that
preceding it. That our girls are in quest of husbands, and know well
in what way their lines in life should be laid, is a fact which none
can dispute. Let men be taught to recognise the same truth as regards
themselves, and we shall cease to hear of the necessity of a new
career for women.

Mary Lowther, though she had never encountered condemnation as a
husband-hunter, had learned all this, and was well aware that for her
there was but one future mode of life that could be really blessed.
She had eyes, and could see; and ears, and could hear. She could
make,--indeed, she could not fail to make,--comparisons between
her aunt and her dear friend, Mrs. Fenwick. She saw, and could not
fail to see, that the life of the one was a starved, thin, poor
life,--which, good as it was in its nature, reached but to few
persons, and admitted but of few sympathies; whereas the other woman,
by means of her position as a wife and a mother, increased her roots
and spread out her branches, so that there was shade, and fruit, and
beauty, and a place in which the birds might build their nests. Mary
Lowther had longed to be a wife,--as do all girls healthy in mind and
body; but she had found it to be necessary to her to love the man who
was to become her husband. There had come to her a suitor recommended
to her by all her friends,--recommended to her also by all outward
circumstances,--and she had found that she did not love him! For a
while she had been sorely perplexed, hardly knowing what it might
be her duty to do, not understanding how it was that the man was
indifferent to her, doubting whether, after all, the love of which
she had dreamt was not a passion which might come after marriage,
rather than before it,--but still fearing to run so great a hazard.
She had doubted, feared, and had hitherto declined,--when that other
lover had fallen in her way. Mr. Gilmore had wooed her for months
without touching her heart. Then Walter Marrable had come and had
conquered her almost in an hour. She had never felt herself disposed
to play with Mr. Gilmore's hair, to lean