Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

as ignoble as the recipients and their motives. We see, or may see, if we use our senses aright, the heroic side of the question. My heart aches with the thought of scores of examples which pass under my eyes in the lives of unknown martyrs of whom this world is not worthy, by whom the world to come will be made the worthier abiding-place of those for whom the Father has prepared it. An old woman, who knew the Bronté sisters as children and women, told me that their body linen was darned by a thread until the original fabric hardly showed between the mending. “But it was always whole and clean, and they made it as carefully as if it were to be trimmed with real lace. Nobody ever saw a rip in their gloves, and they cleaned them themselves. They looked like the ladies they were. Not a bit fashionable, but downright ladylike, you know. They always kept themselves up.” I heard another “downright ladylike” girl, who is almost as poor as the Yorkshire sisters were, insist, the other day, upon dressing for the family dinner when the relative with whom she lived begged her not to change her walking costume. “You are so tired, my dear, after teaching all day!” “We working women can not take such liberties with ourselves,” said the spirited heroine. “If we let the forms of elegant propriety and conventionality go, we are in danger of forgetting what they represent.” Of a like strain was the regard for appearances that led young Ellsworth, who was killed early in the Civil War, decline an invitation to dine with a business acquaintance at a restaurant when Ellsworth was so hungry that the smell of the food made him almost frantic. He was then a poor student working his way through a New York law school. In referring to the incident in more prosperous days, Colonel Ellsworth explained that he could not have accepted a courtesy he would not be able to repay in kind. “A gentleman may starve without loss of caste,” he added.