“Yes, my dear, it looks very well; and now you will oblige me by not wearing that black lace thing, that looks fit for your grandmother.”

“Poor Lovedy Kelland’s aunt made it, mother, and it was very expensive, and wouldn’t sell.”

“No wonder, I am sure, and it was very kind in you to take it off their hands; but now it is paid for, it can’t make much difference whether you disfigure yourself with it or not.”

“Oh yes, dear mother, I’ll bind my hair when you bid me do it and really these buds do credit to the makers.  I wonder whether they cost them as dear in health as lace does,” she added, taking off the flowers and examining them with a grave sad look.

“I chose white roses,” proceeded the well-pleased mother, “because I thought they would suit either of the silks you have now, though I own I should like to see you in another white muslin.”

“I have done with white muslin,” said Rachel, rousing from her reverie.  “It is an affectation of girlish simplicity not becoming at our age.”

“Oh Rachel!” thought Grace in despair; but to her great relief in at that moment filed the five maids, the coachman, and butler, and the mother began to read prayers.

Breakfast over, Rachel gathered up her various gifts, and betook herself to a room on the ground floor with all the appliances of an ancient schoolroom.  Rather dreamily she took out a number of copy-books, and began to write copies in them in large text hand.

“And this is all I am doing for my fellow-creatures,” she muttered half aloud.  “One class of half-grown lads, and those grudged to me!  Here is the world around one mass of misery and evil!  Not a paper do I take up but I see something about wretchedness and crime, and here I sit with health, strength, and knowledge, and able to do nothing, nothing—­at the risk of breaking my mother’s heart!  I have pottered about cottages and taught at schools in the dilettante way of the young lady who thinks it her duty to be charitable; and I am told that it is my duty, and that I may be satisfied.  Satisfied, when I see children cramped in soul, destroyed in body, that fine ladies may wear lace trimmings!  Satisfied with the blight of the most promising buds!  Satisfied, when I know that every alley and lane of town or country reeks with vice and corruption, and that there is one cry for workers with brains and with purses!  And here am I, able and willing, only longing to task myself to the uttermost, yet tethered down to the merest mockery of usefulness by conventionalities.  I am a young lady forsooth!—­I must not be out late, I must not put forth my views; I must not choose my acquaintance, I must be a mere helpless, useless being, growing old in a ridiculous fiction of prolonged childhood, affecting those graces of so-called sweet seventeen that I never had—­because, because why?  Is it for any better reason than because no mother can bear to believe her daughter