Imperial competition was the most aggressive of enterprises, even in times of peace. For Josiah Tucker, a pacifist during the Seven Years' War in the name of le doux commerce, the war at stake was an internal one, to be welcomed in its rigorous conquest of the domestic population. If the realm of sociable commerce made such an imperative palatable through the forms of affective ‘reciprocity’ I have been exploring, it nevertheless could seem a war in all but name. It had, to continue the metaphor, its casualties and deserters, as well as its enemies within. And central to its campaign was the regulation of time: in particular, women's time, which appeared at once to be a cause of, and antidote to, the widespread ‘Vice and Idleness’ Tucker deplored. This chapter considers the relation of ‘women's time’ to the state imagining of the 1760s and 1770s, by tracking the fortunes of one popular sentimental image, Sterne's ‘Poor Maria’, across the social landscape of the period.