reap the harvest of governesses. The daughters of tradespeople,
however well educated, must necessarily be under-bred, and as such
unfit to be inmates of OUR dwellings, or guardians of OUR children's
minds and persons. WE shall ever prefer to place those about OUR
offspring, who have been born and bred with somewhat of the same
refinement as OURSELVES.' I was one of those unhappy women who,
mercifully for the upper classes, inherit manners and misery in
order that the children of these superior creatures may not put an
'r' at the end of 'idea' and may learn how to sit down in a chair
with propriety. My father was a clergyman holding a small country
living. He died when I was five-and-twenty, and I had to teach in
order to earn my bread. I obtained a tolerably good situation, but
at the end of two years I was informed that, although a clergyman's
daughter would 'do very well' so long as her pupils were quite
young, it was now time that they should be handed over to a lady who
had been accustomed to Society. I had become thoroughly weary of my
work. I was not enthusiastic to instruct girls for whom I did not
care. I suppose that if I had been a born teacher, I should have
been as happy with the little Hardmans as I was in the nursery with
my youngest sister now dead. I should not have said to myself, as I
did every morning, 'What does it matter?' In my leisure moments and
holidays during those two years I had written a novel. I could
supply conversation and description, but it was very difficult to
invent a plot, and still more difficult to invent one which of
itself would speak. I had collected a quantity of matter of all
kinds before I began, and then I cast about for a frame in which to
fit it. At last I settled that my hero, if hero he could be called,
should fall in love with a poor but intelligent and educated girl.
He had a fortune of about two thousand pounds a year, nearly the
whole of which he lost through the defalcations of a brother, whose