‘Do you think yourself oppressed now—a victim?’

‘No, mother.’

‘Yet, as far as I understood your tirade, it was a protest against all womanly and domestic employment.’

‘You misunderstood it, mother. I should be sorry not to learn to sew; you do right to teach me, and to make me work.’

‘Even to the mending of your brothers’ stockings and the making of sheets?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is the use of ranting and spouting about it, then?’

‘Am I to do nothing but that? I will do that, and then I will do more. Now, mother, I have said my say. I am twelve years old at present, and not till I am sixteen will I speak again about talents; for four years I bind myself an industrious apprentice to all you can teach me.’

‘You see what my daughters are, Miss Helstone,’ observed Mrs. Yorke—‘how precociously wise in their own conceits. “I would rather this. I prefer that”; such is Jessy’s cuckoo-song, while Rose utters the bolder cry: “I will, and I will not!”’

‘I render a reason, mother; besides, if my cry is bold, it is only heard once in a twelvemonth. About each birthday the spirit moves me to deliver one oracle respecting my own instruction and management. I utter it and leave it; it is for you, mother, to listen or not.’

‘I would advise all young ladies,’ pursued Mrs. Yorke, ‘to study the characters of such children as they chance to meet with before they marry and have any of their own; to consider well how they would like the responsibility of guiding the careless, the labour of persuading the stubborn, the constant burden and task of training the best.’

‘But with love it need not be so very difficult,’ interposed Caroline. ‘Mothers love their children most dearly—almost better than they love themselves.’

‘Fine talk; very sentimental! There is the rough, practical part of life yet to come for you, young miss.’

‘But, Mrs. Yorke, if I take a little baby into my arms—any poor woman’s infant, for instance—I feel that I love that helpless thing quite peculiarly, though I am not its mother. I could do almost anything for it willingly, if it were delivered over entirely to my care—if it were quite dependent on me.’

‘You feel! Yes, yes; I dare say, now; you are led a great deal by your feelings, and you think yourself a very sensitive, refined personage, no doubt. Are you aware that, with all these romantic ideas, you have managed to train your features into an habitually lackadaisical expression, better suited to a novel heroine than to a woman who is to make her way in the real world by dint of common-sense?’

‘No; I am not at all aware of that, Mrs. Yorke.’

‘Look in the glass just behind you. Compare the face you see there with that of any hard-working milkmaid.’

‘My face is a pale one, but it is not sentimental, and most milkmaids, however red and robust they may be, are more stupid and less practically fitted to make their way in the world than I am. I think more and more correctly than milkmaids in general do; consequently, where they would often, for want of reflection, act weakly, I, by dint of reflection, should act judiciously.’

‘Oh no; you would be influenced by your feelings; you would be guided by impulse.’