"But how can you bear to think of making a mere servant-girl of Lucy?"
"The condition of servant-girls is no longer what it once was. They are not servants in the old sense of the word. Their relation to their employers is one of mutual advantage and mutual dependance. In a well-ordered family, a girl is fitting herself for the duties that belong to her sex. She is learning to fill honourably the station of a wife, mistress, and mother of a family."
"Oh, I grant you, in a well-ordered family! but where will you find such? and pray, how are you to know anything of the family you put her in—you have not an acquaintance in the city."
"No, not one—and this it is that perplexes and distresses me. It seems to me we never know the wants of a condition till we are placed in it ourselves. I remember joining in a laugh at the presumption of a servant, who, when asked for her references, asked them in return of the employer. Yet surely the knowledge should be mutual in such a contract."
"You are always refining, wife—what should be and what is in this world are wide apart, and you must submit to what is. I see," he added, after a pause and a groan, "what we are coming to—I never realized it before!"
Shame—shame to thee, Lee! This from a man conscious of having lived for fifteen years in the violation of the laws of temperance, to which are affixed such rewards and such dreadful penalties; who had broken his marriage vows, involving in mortification, hardship, and bitter sorrow her whom he had sworn to cherish and protect; who had not
