Heart indeed! she either marries money and my blessing, or marries beggary and my curse.

But I should like to know who wants her to marry at all?
Let her die an old maid." Probably this dialogue need go no farther: in the coming chapter we will try to be didactic.

Meantime, to apostrophize ten words upon that last heartless sentence: "Let her die an old maid." An old maid! how many unrecorded sorrows, how much of cruel disappointment and heart-cankering delay, how often-times unwritten tragedies are hidden in that thoughtless little phrase! O, the mass of blighted hopes, of slighted affections, of cold neglect, and foolish contumely, wrapped up in those three syllables! Kind heart, kind heart, never use them; neither lightly as in scorn, nor sadly as in pity: spare that ungenerous reproach.

What! canst thou think that from a feminine breast the lover, the wife, the mother, can be utterly sponged away without long years of bitterness?
Can Nature's wounds be cicatrized, or her soft feelings seared, without a thousand secret pangs?
Hath it been no trial to see youthful bloom departing, and middle age creep on, without some intimate one to share the solitude of life?
Ay, and the coming prospect too--hath it greater consolations than the retrospect?
How faintly common friends can fill that hollow of the heart! How feebly can their kindness, at the warmest, imitate the sympathies and love of married life! And in the days of sickness, or the hour of death--to be lonely, childless, husbandless, to be lightly cared for, little missed--who can wonder that all those bruised and broken yearnings should ferment within the solitary mind, and some, times sour up the milk of human kindness?
Be more considerate, more just, more loving to that injured heart of woman; it hath loved deeply in its day; but imperative duty or untoward circumstances nipped those early blossoms, and often generosity towards others, or the constancy of youthful blighted love, has made it thus alone.

There was an age in this world's history, and may be yet again (if Heart is ever to be monarch of this social sphere), when those who lived and died as Jephthah's daughter, were reckoned worthily with saints and martyrs; Heed thou, thus, of many such, for they have offered up their hundred warm yearnings, a hecatomb of human love, to God, the betrothed of their affections; and they move up and down among this inconsiderate world, doing good, Sisters of Charity, full of pure benevolence, and beneficent beyond the widow's mite.