“I don’t know,” said the other (a statement which she seldom made).  “I don’t know much about such things.  Nobody reads poetry any more, you know, Helen, and it doesn’t really help one along very much.”

“It doesn’t do any harm, does it?” inquired the girl, smiling to herself, “just a little, once in a while?”

“Oh, no, of course not,” said the other; “I believe that a woman ought to have a broad education, for she never knows what may be the whims of the men she meets, or what turn a conversation may take.  All I’m afraid of, Helen, is that if you fill your mind with sentimental ideas you might be so silly as to fancy that you were doing something romantic in throwing your one great chance away upon some worthless nobody.  I want you to realize what you are, Helen, and that you owe something to yourself, and to your family, too; for the Roberts have always had wealth and position until your mother chose to marry a poor man.  What I warn you of now is exactly what I warned her of.  Your father is a good man, but he had absolutely nothing to make your mother happy; she was cut off from everything she had been used to,—­she could not even keep a carriage.  And of course she could not receive her old friends, very few of them cared to have anything more to do with her, and so she simply pined away in discontentment and miserable poverty.  You have had an easy life, Helen, and you have no idea of what a horrible thing it is to be poor; you have had the best of teachers, and you have lived at an expensive school, and of course you have always had me to rely upon to introduce you to the right people; but if you married a poor man you couldn’t expect to keep any of those advantages.  I don’t speak of your marrying a man who had no money at all, for that would be too fearful to talk about; but suppose you were to take any one of the young men you might meet at Oakdale even, you’d have to live in a mean little house, and do with one or two servants, and worry yourself about the butcher’s bills and brush your own dresses and drive your own horse.  And how long do you suppose it would be before you repented of that?  Think of having to be like those poor Masons, for instance; they are nice people, and I like them, but I hate to go there, for every time I can’t help seeing that the parlor furniture is more dingy, and thinking how miserable they must be, not to be able to buy new things.  And their servants’ liveries are half worn too; and when you dine there you see that Mrs. Mason is eating with a plated fork, because she has not enough of her best silver to go around.  All those things are trifles, Helen, but think of the worry they must give those poor people, who are pinching themselves and wearing themselves out soul and body, trying to keep in the station where they belong, or used to.  Poor Mrs. Mason is pale and nervous and wrinkled at forty, and those three poor girls, who spend their time making over their old dresses, are so dowdy-looking and uneasy that