During that autumn I became engaged to the Rev. Frank Besant, giving up with a sigh of regret my dreams of the “religious life”, and substituting for them the work which would have to be done as the wife of a priest, laboring ever in the church and among the poor.  A queer view, some people may think, for a girl to take of married life, but it was the natural result of my living the life of the Early Church, of my enthusiasm for religious work.  To me a priest was a half-angelic creature, whose whole life was consecrated to heaven; all that was deepest and truest in my nature chafed against my useless days, longed for work, yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the service of the church and the poor, to the battling against sin and misery.  “You will have more opportunity for doing good as a clergyman’s wife than as anything else,” was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.  My ignorance of all that marriage meant was as profound as though I had been a child of four, and my knowledge of the world was absolutely nil.  My darling mother meant all that was happiest for me when she shielded me from all knowledge of sorrow and of sin, when she guarded me from the smallest idea of the marriage relation, keeping me ignorant as a baby till I left her home a wife.  But looking back now on all, I deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life’s duties and burdens, and then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother’s breast.  That “perfect innocence” maybe very beautiful, but it is a perilous possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and of evil ere she wanders forth from the paradise of a mother’s love.  When a word is never spoken to a girl that is not a caress; when necessary rebuke comes in tone of tenderest reproach; when “You have grieved me” has been the heaviest penalty for a youthful fault; when no anxiety has ever been allowed to trouble the young heart—­then, when the hothouse flower is transplanted, and rough winds blow on it, it droops and fades.

The spring and summer of 1867 passed over with little of incident, save one.  We quitted Harrow, and the wrench was great.  My brother had left school, and had gone to Cambridge; the master, who had lived with us for so long, had married and had gone to a house of his own; my mother thought that as she was growing older, the burden of management was becoming too heavy, and she desired to seek an easier life.  She had saved money enough to pay for my brother’s college career, and she determined to invest the rest of her savings in a house in St. Leonard’s, where she might live for part of the year, letting the house during the season.  She accordingly took and furnished a house in Warrior Square, and we moved thither, saying farewell to the dear Old Vicarage, and the friends loved for so many happy years.