a being apart from the ruck of her sex. She now takes her meals alone,
and at her own hours. She probably breakfasts at half-past seven, and
dashes out to interview the Secretary of the Society for Improving the
Cultivation of Mustard and Cress on the Desert Patches of the Mile End
District. After this she will hasten to Lambeth, in order that mothers
residing in that teeming quarter of the town may be blessed with
mittens and mob-caps, and returning thence she devotes an hour or so
to lectures which are to make her expert in tending the ailments of
humanity. Occasionally the family arrangements are upset, in order
that she may have her dinner at an hour which will make it convenient
to her to attend the meeting of an Institute for Reading Historical
Novels to Working Girls, and her father will lose all his available
stock of good temper on finding that the moments generally devoted by
him to soup are occupied to his exclusion by the apple-tart provided
for his busy daughter. Hence come more storms and misunderstandings.
Paternal feet are put down--for a time, and neglected excellence pines
in bed-rooms.

Shortly afterwards the Undomestic Daughter discovers that nature
intended her to be a hospital nurse, and she takes advantage of a
period when her mother, being occupied in tending a younger brother
through scarlatina cannot offer a determined opposition, to wring an
unwilling consent from her father, and to leave her home in order to
carry out her plan. This phase, however, does not last many weeks, and
she is soon back once more on the parental hands. Thus the years pass
on, the monotony of neglecting her home being varied by occasional
outbursts of enthusiasm which carry her on distant expeditions in
strange company. During one of these she falls in with a lay-preacher,
who to a powerful and convincing style adds the fascination of having
been turned from an early life of undoubted dissipation. She sits at