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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: from the simplest act of reason, and to preside over the faculties
of the mind, like the master-sense of feeling, to rectify the rest;
but (for the comparison may be carried still farther) how often is
the exquisite sensibility of both weakened or destroyed by the
vulgar occupations, and ignoble pleasures of life?
The preserving her situation was, indeed, an important object
to Jemima, who had been hunted from hole to hole, as if she had
been a beast of prey, or infected with a moral plague. The wages
she received, the greater part of which she hoarded, as her only
chance for independence, were much more considerable than she could
reckon on obtaining any where else, were it possible that she,
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