My sister and I used often to plan an expedition of street-singing for the purpose of seeing how much we could collect in that way for some charity.  We were to put ourselves in “poor and mean attire”—­I do not know that we were to “smirch our faces” with brown paint; we thought large battered poke-bonnets would answer the purpose, and, thus disguised, we were to go the rounds of the club windows, my father walking at a discreet distance for our protection on one side of the street, and our formidable pirate friend Trelawney on the other.  We never carried out this project, though I have no doubt it would have brought us a very pretty penny for any endowment we might have wished to make.]

Friday, July 22d.—­Long and edifying talk with dear Dall upon my prospects in marrying.  “While you remain single,” says she, “and choose to work, your fortune is an independent and ample one; as soon as you marry, there’s no such thing.  Your position in society,” says she, “is both a pleasanter and more distinguished one than your birth or real station entitles you to; but that also is the result of your professional exertions, and might, and probably would, alter for the worse if you left the stage; for, after all, it is mere frivolous fashionable popularity.”  I ought to have got up and made her a courtesy for that.  So that it seems I have fortune and fame (such as it is)—­positive real advantages, which I cannot give with myself, and which I cease to own when I give myself away, which certainly makes my marrying any one or any one marrying me rather a solemn consideration; for I lose everything, and my marryee gains nothing in a worldly point of view—­says she—­and it’s incontrovertible and not pleasant.  So I took up Dante, and read about devils boiled in pitch, which refreshed my imagination and cheered my spirits very much.

[How far my ingenious mind was from foreseeing the days when men of high rank and social station would marry singers, dancers, and actresses, and be condescending enough to let their wives continue to earn their bread by public exhibition, and even to appropriate the proceeds of their theatrical labors!  I have not yet made up my mind whether, in these cases, the gentleman ought not to take his wife’s name in private, as a compensation for her not taking his in public.  Poor Miss Paton’s noble husband was the only Englishman, that I know of, who committed that act of self-effacement.  To go much further back in dramatic and social history, the old, accomplished, mad Earl of Peterborough married the famous singer Anastasia Robinson, and refused to acknowledge the fact till her death.  To be sure, this was a more cowardly, but a less dirty meanness.  He withheld his name from her, but did not take her money.]