"I know all this, John, and it makes me love you! oh, how dearly; but then it is wrong—very, very delightful, but still wrong."
"Why wrong, Jane, I cannot understand that?"
"Wrong—why because it might, if I were only selfish enough to take advantage of your tenderness, make me a very useless, gossiping, idle sort of person."
"You would never come to that, Jane."
"No, I should not like to become one of those worthless drones in the great hive of human life, who exist daintily on their husbands' energies, making him the slave of capricious wants that would never arise but for the idea that it is refined and feminine to be useless. I would be a wife; a companion; a help to my husband."
"And so you are, all these and more," said Chester, gazing with delight on her animated face. "God bless you, Jane, for you have been to me a noble and a true wife."
"Well, then, of course I am to have my own way now. This poor child,
I shall not mind in the least asking about work, when it is for her."
"But the shopkeepers, they will not know why you do this."
"Well, what need I care for them?"
"They will think you have a very shiftless, or perhaps dissipated husband, who obliges you to go about among them begging for work."