It was an unacknowledged partnership, which often provided two opinions for the same price; the town prophesied well of it.

That left only five at home, but they always had Abby over in the West Ward, where Abby's housekeeping made an interest and Abby's baby a point of pilgrimage.
These considerations almost consoled Mrs Murchison declaring, as she did, that all of them might have gone but Abby, who alone knew how to be "any comfort or any dependence" in the house; who could be left with a day's preserving; and I tell you that to be left by Mrs Murchison with a day's preserving, be it cherries or strawberries, damsons or pears, was a mark of confidence not easy to obtain.

Advena never had it; Advena, indeed, might have married and removed no prop of the family economy.
Mrs Murchison would have been "sorry for the man"-- she maintained a candour toward and about those belonging to her that permitted no illusions--but she would have stood cheerfully out of the way on her own account.

When you have seen your daughter reach and pass the age of twenty-five without having learned properly to make her own bed, you know without being told that she will never be fit for the management of a house--don't you?
Very well then.

And for ever and for ever, no matter what there was to do, with a book in her hand--Mrs Murchison would put an emphasis on the "book" which scarcely concealed a contempt for such absorption.