, growing more spirited every day, and growing
in her beauty too, her father was chairman at many a Trades' Union meeting; a
friend of delegates, and ambitious of being a delegate himself; a Chartist, and
ready to do anything for his order.
    But now times were good; and all these feelings were theoretical, not
practical. His most practical thought was getting Mary apprenticed to a
dressmaker; for he had never left off disliking a factory life for a girl, on
more accounts than one.
    Mary must do something. The factories being, as I said, out of the question,
there were two things open - going out to service and the dressmaking business;
and against the first of these, Mary set herself with all the force of her
strong will. What that will might have been able to achieve had her father been
against her, I cannot tell; but he disliked the idea of parting with her, who
was the light of his hearth; the voice of his otherwise silent home. Besides,
with his ideas and feelings towards the higher classes, he considered domestic
servitude as a species of slavery; a pampering of artificial wants on the one
side, a giving up of every right of leisure by day and quiet rest by night on
the other. How far his strong exaggerated feelings had any foundation in truth,
it is for you to judge. I am afraid that Mary's determination not to go to
service arose from far less sensible thoughts on the subject than her father's.
Three years of independence of action (since her mother's death such a time had
now elapsed) had little inclined her to submit to rules as to hours and
associates, to regulate her dress by a mistress's ideas of propriety, to lose
the dear feminine privileges of gossiping with a merry neighbour, and working
night and day to help one who was sorrowful. Besides all this, the sayings of
her absent, the mysterious aunt Esther, had an unacknowledged influence over
Mary. She knew she was very pretty; the factory people as they poured from the
mills, and in their freedom told the truth (whatever it might be) to every
passer-by, had early let Mary into the secret of her beauty. If their remarks
had fallen on an unheeding ear, there were always young men enough, in a
different rank from her own, who were willing to compliment the pretty weaver's
daughter as they met her in the streets. Besides, trust a girl of sixteen for
knowing it well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she