"
"I do not quite understand you," said Miss Vavasor.
"Well, for instance," returned Hester, willing to give the question a
general bearing, "a mother in your class, according at least to much
that I have heard, considers the duties she owes to society, duties that
consist in what looks to me the merest dissipation and killing of time,
as paramount even to those of a mother. Because of those 'traditions of
men,' or fancies of fashionable women rather, she justifies herself in
leaving her children in the nursery to the care of other women--the
vulgarest sometimes."
"Not knowingly," said Miss Vavasor. "We are all liable to mistakes."
"But certainly," insisted Hester, "without taking the pains necessary to
know for themselves the characters of those to whom they trust the
children God has given to their charge; whereas to abandon them to the
care of angels themselves would be to go against the laws of nature and
the calling of God."
Miss Vavasor began to think it scarcely desirable to bring a woman of
such levelling opinions into their quiet circle: she would be preaching
next that women were wicked who did not nurse their own brats! But she
would be faithful to Gartley!
"To set up as reformers would be to have the whole hive about our ears,"
she said.
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