Besides,
trust a girl of sixteen for knowing it well if she is pretty;
concerning her plainness she may be ignorant. So with this
consciousness she had early determined that her beauty should make
her a lady; the rank she coveted the more for her father's abuse;
the rank to which she firmly believed her lost aunt Esther had
arrived. Now, while a servant must often drudge and be dirty, must
be known as his servant by all who visited at her master's house, a
dressmaker's apprentice must (or so Mary thought) be always dressed
with a certain regard to appearances; must never soil her hands, and
need never redden or dirty her face with hard labour. Before my
telling you so truly what folly Mary felt or thought, injures her
without redemption in your opinion, think what are the silly fancies
of sixteen years of age in every class, and under all circumstances.
The end of all the thoughts of father and daughter was, as I said
before, Mary was to be a dressmaker; and her ambition prompted her
unwilling father to apply at all the first establishments, to know
on what terms of painstaking and zeal his daughter might be admitted
into ever so humble a workwoman's situation.
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