Excerpt: “My dear, the girl’s a perfect fool. What her poor mother is going to do with her I don’t know. As for teaching, I don’t believe she knows anything herself. And as for getting married, why, I’m perfectly certain she doesn’t know beef from mutton, and couldn’t tell the difference between a cabbage and a cauliflower. I should be very sorry for the man who took Chris Abercarne for a wife!” So spoke one of Chris Abercarne’s mother’s friends to another old lady, who was of exactly the same way of thinking, as a pretty girl, with dark-brown hair and merry dark blue eyes, passed the window of a dull house in a dull road in that part of Hammersmith which calls itself West Kensington. Indeed, matters had come to a serious point with Chris and her mother. The widow of an officer in the army, Mrs. Abercarne, having only the one child, had got on very comfortably for some years, until one of those periodical upheavals of “things in the city” had caused a sudden diminution of her small income, and brought the two ladies face to face with actual instead of conventional, poverty. Poor Mrs. Abercarne felt utterly helpless; and Chris, merry Chris who hitherto had had nothing to do but to laugh and keep her mother and her friends in good spirits, found with surprising suddenness that some aspects of life are no laughing matter."
