in my nature chafed against my easy, useless days, longed for work,
yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the
service of the Church and of the poor, to the battling against sin and
misery--what empty names sin and misery then were to me! "You will
have more opportunities for doing good as a clergyman's wife than as
anything else," was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.

In the autumn I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months
later. Once, in the interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on
my broaching the subject to my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt.
Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by
jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry? She could be stern where
honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I yielded to her
wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her had
ever been my law, save where religion was concerned. So I married in
the winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I
had been four years old instead of twenty. My dreamy life, into which
no knowledge of evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been
guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all
questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me
defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I
deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a
girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and
then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old
associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast.
That "perfect innocence" may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous
possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she
wanders forth from the paradise of a mother's love. Many an unhappy
marriage dates from its very beginning, from the terrible shock to a
young girl's sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless bewilderment and