And why not--with a sufficient income, a comfortable home, and fair health?
At the end of a day devoted partly to sheer vacuous idleness and partly to the monotonous simple machinery of physical existence--everlasting cookery, everlasting cleanliness, everlasting stitchery--her mother did not with a yearning sigh demand, "Must this sort of thing continue for ever, or will a new era dawn ?" Not a bit! Mrs.Lessways went to bed in the placid expectancy of a very similar day on the morrow, and of an interminable succession of such days.

The which was incomprehensible and offensive to Hilda.
She was in a prison with her mother, and saw no method of escape, saw not so much as a locked door, saw nothing but blank walls.

Even could she by a miracle break prison, where should she look for the unknown object of her desire, and for what should she look?
Enigmas! It is true that she read, occasionally with feverish enjoyment, especially verse.
But she did not and could not read enough.

Of the shelf-ful of books which in thirty years had drifted by one accident or another into the Lessways household, she had read every volume, except Cruden's Concordance.

A heterogeneous and forlorn assemblage! Lavater's _Physiognomy_, in a translation and in full calf! Thomson's _Seasons_, which had thrilled her by its romantic beauty! Mrs.Henry Wood's _Danesbury House_, and one or two novels by Charlotte M.Yonge and Dinah Maria Craik, which she had gulped eagerly down for the mere interest of their stories.