Coming home, she paused wistfully before a glittering shoe shop; her poor little feet were so soaked and cold.  Could she possibly afford a new pair of boots?  It was not a matter of vanity—­she had passed that.  She did not care now how ugly and shabby looked the “wee feet” that had once been praised; but she felt it might be a matter of health and prudence.  Suppose she caught cold—­fell ill—­died:  died, leaving Johanna to struggle alone; died before Robert Lyon came home.  Both thoughts struck sharp.  She was too young still, or had not suffered enough, calmly to think of death and dying.

“It will do no harm to inquire the price.  I might stop it out in omnibuses.”

For this was the way that every new article of dress had to be procured—­“stopping it cut” of something else.

After trying several pairs-with a fierce, bitter blush at a small hole which the day’s walking had worn in her well darned stockings, and which she was sure the shopman saw, as well as an old lady who sat opposite—­Hilary bought the plainest and stoutest of boots.  The bill overstepped her purse by six pence, but she promised that sum on delivery, and paid the rest.  She had got into a nervous horror of letting any account stand over for a single day.

Look tenderly, reader, on this picture of struggles so small, of sufferings so uninteresting and mean.  I paint it not because it is original, but because it is so awfully true.  Thousands of women, well born, well reared, know it to be true—­burned into them by the cruel conflict of their youth; happy they if it ended in their youth, while mind and body had still enough vitality and elasticity to endure!  I paint it, because it accounts for the accusation sometimes made—­especially by men—­that women are naturally stingy.  Possibly so:  but in many instances may it not have been this petty struggle with petty wants this pitiful calculating of penny against penny, how best to save here and spend there, which narrows a woman’s nature in spite of herself?  It sometimes takes years of comparative ease and freedom from pecuniary cares to counteract the grinding, lowering effects of a youth of poverty.

And I paint this picture, too, literally, and not on its picturesque side—­it, indeed, poverty has a picturesque side—­in order to show another side which it really has—­high, heroic, made up of dauntless endurance, self sacrifice, and self control Also, to indicate that blessing which narrow circumstances alone bestow, the habit of looking more to the realities than to the shows of things, and of finding pleasure in enjoyments mental rather than sensuous, inward rather than external.  When people can truly recognize this they cease either to be afraid or ashamed of poverty.