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.

Hilary was not ashamed:--not even now, when hers smote sharper and
harder than it had ever done at Stowbury. She felt it a sore thing
enough; but it never humiliated nor angered her. Either she was too
proud or not proud enough; but her low estate always seemed to her
too simply external a thing to affect her relations with the world
outside. She never thought of being annoyed with the shopkeeper, who,
though he trusted her with the sixpence, carefully took down her name
and address: still less to suspecting the old lady opposite, who sat
and listened to the transaction--apparently a well-to-do customer,
clad in a rich black silk and handsome sable furs--of looking down
upon her and despising her. She herself never despised any body,
except for wickedness.

So she waited contentedly, neither thinking of herself, nor of what