"Does Matilda dine on our native beetles, my dear?
She hasn't touched my humble collection." "Oh, if you make fun of everything----" Aunt Theresa began; but at this moment Mrs.St.John was announced.
After the customary civilities, Aunt Theresa soon began to talk of poor Matilda, and Mrs.St.John entered warmly into the subject.
To do the ladies of the regiment justice, they sympathized freely with each other's domestic troubles; and indeed it was not for lack of taking counsel that any of them had any domestic troubles at all.
"Girls are a good deal more difficult to manage than boys, I'm afraid," sighed Aunt Theresa, repeating Mrs.O'Connor's _dictum_.
"Women are _dreadful_ creatures at any age," said Mrs.St.John to the Major, opening her brown eyes in the way she always does when she is talking to a gentleman.

"I always _longed_ to have been a man." [Eleanor says she hates to hear girls say they wish they were boys.

If they do wish it, I do not myself see why they should not say so.

But one thing has always struck me as very odd.

If you meet a woman who is incomparably silly, who does not know an art or a trade by which she could keep herself from starvation, who could not manage the account-books of a village shop, who is unpunctual, unreasoning, and in every respect uneducated--a woman, in short, who has, one would think, daily reason to be thankful that her necessities are supplied by other people, she is pretty sure to be always regretting that she is not a man.
Another, trick that some silly ladies have _riles_ me (as we say in Yorkshire) far more than this odd ambition for responsibilities one is quite incompetent to assume.