Some young ladies—­quite as lady-like as any who roll in chariots—­cannot even afford a cab.  ’What I call the pinch of poverty,’ observed an example of this class, ’is the waiting for omnibus after omnibus on a wet afternoon and finding them all full.’

‘But surely,’ I replied with gallantry, ’any man would have given up his seat to you?’

She shook her head with a smile that had very little fun in it.  ’People in omnibuses,’ she said, ‘don’t give up their seats to others.’  Nor, I am bound to confess, do they do so elsewhere; if I had been in their place, perhaps I should have been equally selfish; though I do think I should have made an effort, in this instance at least, to make room for her close beside me.[4]

[4] There is, however, some danger in this.  I remember reading of some highly respectable old gentleman in the City who thus accommodated on a wet day a very nice young woman in humble circumstances.  She was as full of apologies as of rainwater, and he of good-natured rejoinders, intended to put her at her ease; so that he became, in a Platonic and paternal way, quite friendly with her by the time she arrived at her destination—­which happened to be his own door.  She turned out to be his new cook, which was afterwards very embarrassing.

A young governess whom some wicked fairy endowed at her birth with the sensitiveness often denied to princesses, has assured me that her journeys by railway have sometimes been rendered miserable by the thought that she had not even a few pence to spare for the porter who would presently shoulder her little box on to the roof of her cab.

It is people of this class, much more than those beneath them, who are shut out from all amusements.  The mechanic goes to the play and to the music-hall, and occasionally takes his ‘old girl,’ as he calls his wife, and even ‘a kid’ or two, to the Crystal Palace.  But those I have in my mind have no such relaxation from compulsory duty and importunate care.  ‘I know it’s very foolish, but I feel it sometimes to be a pinch,’ says one of these ill-fated ones, ’to see them all [the daughters of her employer] going to the play, or the opera, while I am expected to be satisfied with a private view of their pretty dresses.’  No doubt it is the sense of comparison (especially with the female) that sharpens the sting of poverty.  It is not, however, through envy that the ’prosperity of fools destroys us,’ so much as the knowledge of its unnecessariness and waste.  When a mother has a sick child who needs sea air, which she cannot afford to give it, the consciousness that her neighbour’s family (the head of which perhaps is a most successful financier and market-rigger) are going to the Isle of Wight for three months, though there is nothing at all the matter with them, is an added bitterness.  How often it is said (no doubt with some well-intentioned idea of consolation) that after all money cannot buy