A very short time, and you'll be a worn, faded old maid, and the settled people who profess to be so fond of you will be laughing at you, and deriding you, and pitying you." Deriding! Pitying! "I've no patience with the women of that clique you're so fond of," the old lady went on.

"If the ideas they profess--the shallow frauds that they are!--were to prevail, what would become of women of our station?
Women should hold themselves dear, should encourage men in that old-time reverence for the sex and its right to be sheltered and worshiped and showered with luxury.

As for you--a poor girl--countenancing such low and ruinous views--Is it strange I am disgusted with you?
Have you no pride--no self-respect ?" Margaret sat motionless, gazing into vacancy.

She could not but endorse every word her grandmother was saying.

She had heard practically those same words often, but they had had no effect; now, toward the end of this her least successful season, with most of her acquaintances married off, and enjoying and flaunting the luxury she might have had--for, they had married men, of "the right sort"-- "capable husbands"-- men who had been more or less attentive to her--now, these grim and terrible axioms of worldly wisdom, of upper class honor, from her grandmother sounded in her ears like the boom of surf on reefs in the ears of the sailor.
A long miserable silence; then, her grandmother: "What do you purpose to do, Margaret ?" "To hustle," said the girl with a short, bitter laugh.