Many consultations had the three sisters held before such a
revolutionary extravagance was determined on. But Miss Leaf was
beginning both to look and to feel "not so young as she had been;"
Miss Selina ditto; though, being still under forty, she would not
have acknowledged it for the world. And Miss Hilary young, bright,
and active as she was, could by no possibility do every thing that
was to be done in the little establishment: be, for instance, in
three places at once--in the school-room, teaching little boys and
girls, in the kitchen cooking dinner, and in the rooms up stairs busy
at house-maid's work. Besides, much of her time was spent in waiting
upon "poor Selina," who frequently was, or fancied her self, too ill
to take any part in either the school or house duties.

Though, the thing being inevitable, she said little about it, Miss
Leaf's heart was often sore to see Hilary's pretty hands smeared with
blacking of grates, and roughened with scouring of floors. To herself
this sort of thing had become natural--but Hilary!

All the time of Hilary's childhood, the youngest of the family had of
course, been spared all house-work; and afterward her studies had
left no time for it. For she was a clever girl, with a genuine love
of knowledge Latin, Greek, and even the higher branches of arithmetic
and mathematics, were not beyond her range; and this she found much
more interesting than washing dishes or sweeping floors. True, she
always did whatever domestic duty she was told to do; but her bent
was not in the household line. She had only lately learned to "see
dust," to make a pudding, to iron a shirt; and, moreover, to reflect,
as she woke up to the knowledge of how these things should be done,
and how necessary they were, what must have been her eldest sister's
lot during all these twenty years! What pains, what weariness, what