"There was, of course, some old romance," her friends all said, but who the hero of it was, even rumor whispered not.
It is quite possible that neither hero nor romance had ever entered her life.
She belonged to that type of women, not uncommon in New England, who do not feel the necessity of domestic relations for their happiness, and to whom men are rather antagonistic than attractive.
These women are often among the hardest workers in the social community, and are unremitting in their charitable labors. They are dubbed "strong-minded,"—a title which they resent almost universally, and yet it is one they fully deserve.
It seems as though a wise provision of Providence had created a certain proportion of the women of the Eastern States with this independence of nature, to fit them for the life of moral and physical self-support imposed upon them by the disproportionately small number of men in these regions.
