[4] There is, however, some danger in this. I remember reading of
some highly respectable old gentleman in the City who thus
accommodated on a wet day a very nice young woman in humble
circumstances. She was as full of apologies as of rainwater, and
he of good-natured rejoinders, intended to put her at her ease; so
that he became, in a Platonic and paternal way, quite friendly
with her by the time she arrived at her destination--which
happened to be his own door. She turned out to be his new cook,
which was afterwards very embarrassing.

A young governess whom some wicked fairy endowed at her birth with
the sensitiveness often denied to princesses, has assured me that
her journeys by railway have sometimes been rendered miserable by
the thought that she had not even a few pence to spare for the
porter who would presently shoulder her little box on to the roof
of her cab.

It is people of this class, much more than those beneath them, who are
shut out from all amusements. The mechanic goes to the play and to the
music-hall, and occasionally takes his 'old girl,' as he calls his wife,
and even 'a kid' or two, to the Crystal Palace. But those I have in my
mind have no such relaxation from compulsory duty and importunate care.
'I know it's very foolish, but I feel it sometimes to be a pinch,' says
one of these ill-fated ones, 'to see them all [the daughters of her
employer] going to the play, or the opera, while I am expected to be
satisfied with a private view of their pretty dresses.' No doubt it is
the sense of comparison (especially with the female) that sharpens the
sting of poverty. It is not, however, through envy that the 'prosperity
of fools destroys us,' so much as the knowledge of its unnecessariness
and waste. When a mother has a sick child who needs sea air, which she