the partner who wished to share this responsibility. About all this she spoke in the frankest way to her friends. It seemed, therefore, that she would soon be reduced to teaching or needlework, that last resource of destitute women. Her father's dishonest waste had now reduced the savings of thirty years' labour to about five hundred and eighty pounds. Worse than this, M. Phlipon had lost all his custom, and, what was a greater affliction to his daughter, his honesty into the bargain. "I don't know how it is," she tells Sophie, "but every time my father gives me a fresh cause of annoyance, I feel an impulse of tenderness towards him, which seems to be there on purpose to enhance my suffering." Her friend, in trying to comfort her, remarks that the faults of our children are more humiliating to us than those of our parents, but added a remark calculated to cut Manon to the quick, that "from our birth we are destined to wear the moral liveries of our parents!"
Poor Manon's best anodyne was an increase of benevolent activity. She was always at this time engaged in some active work of charity or other; now visiting some destitute woman or spending her dress-money on some deeply-indebted father of a family. She was now approaching the time of her majority, fixed at twenty-five by the French law. Even her dilatory relatives felt it necessary to take some decisive steps to bring about a division of property in favour of the daughter. But these steps, by humiliating M. Phlipon, only aggravated the position of affairs. In consequence of this he became so irritated, that at last, in June 1779, he bade his daughter leave his house once and for ever.
This violent threat was not a little calculated to
