In the autumn I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months later.  Once, in the interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on my broaching the subject to my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt.  Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry?  She could be stern where honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I yielded to her wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her had ever been my law, save where religion was concerned.  So I married in the winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I had been four years old instead of twenty.  My dreamy life, into which no knowledge of evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me defenceless to face a rude awakening.  Looking back on it 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” may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she wanders forth from the paradise of a mother’s love.  Many an unhappy marriage dates from its very beginning, from the terrible shock to a young girl’s sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless bewilderment and fear.  Men, with their public school and college education, or the knowledge that comes by living in the outside world, may find it hard to realise the possibility of such infantile ignorance in many girls.  None the less, such ignorance is a fact in the case of some girls at least, and no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip her neck under the marriage yoke.

Before leaving the harbourage of girlhood to set sail on the troublous sea of life, there is an occurrence of which I must make mention, as it marks my first awakening of interest in the outer world of political struggle.  In the autumn of 1867 my mother and I were staying with some dear friends of ours, the Robertses, at Pendleton, near Manchester.  Mr. Roberts was “the poor man’s lawyer,” in the affectionate phrase used of him by many a hundred men.  He was a close friend of Ernest Jones, and was always ready to fight a poor man’s battle without fee.  He worked hard in the agitation which saved women from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely reaching to their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all womanly decency and grace; and how he had seen little children working there too, babies of three and four set to watch a door, and falling asleep at their work to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair