Quotation by Clara Lanza

Twenty-five or thirty years ago it was natural for a girl to look forward to marriage as embodying all that was of consequence in life. Not to have done so would have stamped the bold Philistine with the fatal brand of eccentricity; and had she perchance gone yet farther and dared to fling conventionality to the winds by earning her bread in a sphere of employment hitherto confined to the sterner sex, her genteel acquaintances would have passed by on the other side, not so much from a snobbish sense of superiority as from a deep-rooted conviction that the unfortunate woman in question had deliberately plunged into the very vortex of sin and humiliation.