“But I could get nothing to do but to take a governess’s situation; and wonderfully lucky I was to get it.  Mary Forrester is a much better governess for Mr. Phillips’s family than I was.  Elsie could only maintain herself as a milliner or as a lady’s maid; and yet Elsie, placed as a clerk or bookkeeper in a bank or merchant’s office, would have filled the situation as satisfactorily as half the young men I know.”

“Then you have not quite given up your notions of woman’s rights?” said Mr. Dempster.  “For my part, I think the best right a woman has is the right to a husband.”

“That is a right she cannot assert for herself,” said Jane, smiling.  “One would think, to hear people talk on this subject, that the entreaties for work and independence come from those who in their youth disdained faithful lovers, and perversely and unnaturally refused to love, honour, and obey.  I think, on the contrary, that the women of our century are only too easily won, and cannot be charged with any unnecessary cruelty to lovers.  I do not think that you increase the number of happy marriages or lessen the number of mercenary unions by making the task for a single woman to maintain herself honestly and usefully such very uphill work.”