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 loss. Instead of baking bread for her husband or father, her husband or father had to expend his money on buying bread for her to eat; she no longer wove the material for other people's garments; on the contrary the material for her own had to be obtained at the draper's. The position, for man, was a serious one; for be it remembered, he could not lower the wages of his domestic animal. These had always been fixed, whatever work she did, at the lowest possible rate—subsistence rate; so that even when her work ceased to be profitable her wages could not be made to go any lower—there was nowhere lower for them to go. One's daughter had to be fed, clothed and lodged even if the narrowed scope of the home provided her with no more lucrative employment than dusting china dogs on the mantelpiece.

Under these circumstances the daughters of a household found themselves, often enough, face to face with a divided duty: the duty of earning their keep, which would necessitate emergence from the home, and the duty of remaining inside the sacred sphere—and confining their energies to china dogs. Left to themselves the more