Good plain cooks at twenty pounds a year will see to
these things for us; and, now and then, when a windfall comes our
way, we will dine together at a moderate-priced restaurant where
these things are managed even better. Your work, Dear, is to teach
us gentleness and kindliness. Lay your curls here, child. It is
from such as you that we learn wisdom. Foolish wise folk sneer at
you; foolish wise folk would pull up the useless lilies, the
needless roses, from the garden, would plant in their places only
serviceable wholesome cabbage. But the Gardener knowing better,
plants the silly short-lived flowers; foolish wise folk, asking for
what purpose.
As for Agnes, Mr. Dickens, do you know what she always makes me
think of? You will not mind my saying?--the woman one reads about.
Frankly, I don't believe in her. I do not refer to Agnes in
particular, but the woman of whom she is a type, the faultless woman
we read of. Women have many faults, but, thank God, they have one
redeeming virtue--they are none of them faultless.
But the heroine of fiction! oh, a terrible dragon of virtue is she.
May heaven preserve us poor men, undeserving though we be, from a
life with the heroine of fiction.
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