She had got into a nervous horror of letting any account stand over for a single day.
Look tenderly, reader, on this picture of struggles so small, of sufferings so uninteresting and mean.

I paint it not because it is original, but because it is so awfully true.

Thousands of women, well born, well reared, know it to be true--burned into them by the cruel conflict of their youth; happy they if it ended in their youth, while mind and body had still enough vitality and elasticity to endure! I paint it, because it accounts for the accusation sometimes made--especially by men--that women are naturally stingy.

Possibly so: but in many instances may it not have been this petty struggle with petty wants this pitiful calculating of penny against penny, how best to save here and spend there, which narrows a woman's nature in spite of herself?
It sometimes takes years of comparative ease and freedom from pecuniary cares to counteract the grinding, lowering effects of a youth of poverty.
And I paint this picture, too, literally, and not on its picturesque side--it, indeed, poverty has a picturesque side--in order to show another side which it really has--high, heroic, made up of dauntless endurance, self sacrifice, and self control Also, to indicate that blessing which narrow circumstances alone bestow, the habit of looking more to the realities than to the shows of things, and of finding pleasure in enjoyments mental rather than sensuous, inward rather than external.

When people can truly recognize this they cease either to be afraid or ashamed of poverty.
Hilary was not ashamed:--not even now, when hers smote sharper and harder than it had ever done at Stowbury.