scarcely twenty!"

Barbara Högden had not the faintest suspicion, as she carried water and
wood, or stood at the edge of the ice beating linen, or did any drudgery
she could find to do, in order to earn a little money to pay for herself
and her baby at the tinsmith's, that, from her deepest degradation, she
had risen at one step to the rank of an exceptionally sought-after and
esteemed person in the town.

For a nurse _is_ an esteemed person. Indeed, she is on the expectancy
list to become respected.

After having nursed her mistress's child, and been a correspondingly
unnatural mother to her own, she ends by sleeping on down, and being
considered in every way, until a new nurse for a new heir deposes her
from her dynasty.

Should she prefer to give her own little baby the only treasure she
possesses, her healthy breast, should she really be so blind to her own
interests, why then the case is different, and (to use Dr. Schneibel's
words) not altogether unmerited, only a result of the social economy to
which she does not know how to be intelligently subordinate, and which
will reduce her, with the inexorable logic of the laws of civilisation,
to a useless superfluity, which Society's organism rejects. Or, vulgarly
speaking, she is left with shame, contempt and poverty resting upon both
her and her illegitimate offspring. As a private individual, she is in a
sense right; but socially, as a member of society----!

At first poor Barbara was quite blind on this point, utterly obstinate,
rigid as a mountain pony that could not be got to stir.