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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Woman of the World, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Woman of the World
+       Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters
+
+Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox
+
+Release Date: April 14, 2004 [EBook #12020]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WOMAN OF THE WORLD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Joris Van Dael and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A Woman of the World
+
+HER COUNSEL TO OTHER PEOPLE'S SONS AND DAUGHTERS
+
+By
+
+Ella Wheeler Wilcox
+
+1904
+
+Fourth Impression, April, 1910
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+TO MR. RAY GILBERT, _Law Student, Aged Twenty-three_
+
+TO MISS WINIFRED CLAYBORNE, _At Vassar College_
+
+TO EDNA GORDON, _During Her Honeymoon_
+
+TO MISS GLADYS WESTON, _Who Faces the Necessity to Earn a Living_
+
+TO CLARENCE ST. CLAIRE, _Regarding His Sister's Betrothal_
+
+TO MISS MARGARET RILEY, _Shop Girl, Concerning Her Oppressors_
+
+TO MISS GLADYS WESTON, _After Three Years as a Teacher_
+
+TO A YOUNG FRIEND, _Who Has Become Interested in the Metaphysical
+Thoughts of the Day_
+
+TO WILFRED CLAYBORN, _Concerning His Education and His Profession_
+
+TO MISS ELSIE DEAN, _Regarding the Habit of Exaggeration_
+
+TO SYBYL MARCHMONT, _Who Has Learned Her Origin_
+
+TO MISS DIANA RIVERS, _A Young Lady Contemplating a Career as a
+Journalist_
+
+TO NANETTE, _A Former Maid_
+
+TO THE REV. WILTON MARSH, _Regarding His Son and Daughter_
+
+TO MRS. CHARLES MCALLISTER, _Formerly Miss Winifred Clayborne_
+
+TO MRS. CHARLES GORDON, _Concerning Maternity_
+
+TO MR. ALFRED DUNCAN, _Concerning the Ministry_
+
+TO MR. CHARLES GRAY, _Concerning Polygamy_
+
+TO WALTER SMEED, _Concerning Creeds and Marriage_
+
+TO SYBYL MARCHMONT, _Concerning Her Determination to Remain Single_
+
+TO MRS. CHARLES GORDON, _Concerning Her Sister and Her Children_
+
+TO MRS. CHARLES GORDON, _Concerning Her Children_
+
+TO Miss ZOE CLAYBORN, ARTIST, _Concerning the Attentions of Married Men_
+
+TO MR. CHARLES GORDON, _Concerning the Jealousy of His Wife After Seven
+Years of Married Life_
+
+TO MRS. CLARENCE ST. CLAIRE, _Concerning Her Husband_
+
+TO YOUNG MRS. DUNCAN, _Regarding Mothers-in-Law._
+
+TO A YOUNG MAN, _Ambitious for Literary Honours_
+
+TO MRS. MCALLISTER, _Concerning Her Little Girl_
+
+TO MR. RAY GILBERT, _Attorney at Law, Aged Thirty_
+
+TO THE SISTER OF A GREAT BEAUTY
+
+TO MRS. WHITE PEAK, _One of the Pillars of Respectable Society_
+
+TO MARIA OWENS, _A New Woman Contemplating Marriage_
+
+TO MRS. ST. CLAIRE, _The Young Divorcee_
+
+TO MISS JESSIE HARCOURT, _Regarding Her Marriage with a Poor Young Man_
+
+TO MISS JANE CARTER, _Of the W.C.T.U_
+
+
+
+
+To Mr. Ray Gilbert
+
+_Late Student, Aged Twenty-three_
+
+
+Were you an older man, my dear Ray, your letter would be consigned to
+the flames unanswered, and our friendship would become constrained and
+formal, if it did not end utterly. But knowing you to be so many years
+my junior, and so slightly acquainted with yourself or womankind, I am
+going to be the friend you need, instead of the misfortune you invite.
+
+I will not say that your letter was a complete surprise to me. It is
+seldom a woman is so unsophisticated in the ways of men that she is not
+aware when friendship passes the borderline and trespasses on the domain
+of passion.
+
+I realized on the last two occasions we met that you were not quite
+normal. The first was at Mrs. Hanover's dinner; and I attributed some
+indiscreet words and actions on your part to the very old Burgundy
+served to a very young man.
+
+Since the memory of mortal, Bacchus has been a confederate of Cupid, and
+the victims of the former have a period (though brief indeed) of
+believing themselves slaves to the latter.
+
+As I chanced to be your right-hand neighbour at that very merry board,
+where wit, wisdom, and beauty combined to condense hours into minutes, I
+considered it a mere accident that you gave yourself to me with somewhat
+marked devotion. Had I been any other one of the ladies present, it
+would have been the same, I thought. Our next and last encounter,
+however, set me thinking.
+
+It was fully a week later, and that most unromantic portion of the day,
+between breakfast and luncheon.
+
+It was a Bagby recital, and you sought me out as I was listening to the
+music, and caused me to leave before the programme was half done. You
+were no longer under the dominion of Bacchus, though Euterpe may have
+taken his task upon herself, as she often does, and your manner and
+expression of countenance troubled me.
+
+I happen to be a woman whose heart life is absolutely complete. I have
+realized my dreams, and have no least desire to turn them into
+nightmares. I like original roles, too, and that of the really happy
+wife is less hackneyed than the part of the "misunderstood woman." And I
+find greater enjoyment in the steady flame of one lamp than in the
+flaring light of many candles.
+
+I have taken a good deal of pride in keeping my lamp well trimmed and
+brightly burning, and I was startled and offended at the idea of any man
+coming so near he imagined he might blow out the light.
+
+Your letter, however, makes me more sorry than angry.
+
+You are passing through a phase of experience which comes to almost
+every youth, between sixteen and twenty-four.
+
+Your affectional and romantic nature is blossoming out, and you are in
+that transition period where an older woman appeals to you.
+
+Being crude and unformed yourself, the mature and ripened mind and body
+attract you.
+
+A very young man is fascinated by an older woman's charms, just as a
+very old man is drawn to a girl in her teens.
+
+This is according to the law of completion, each entity seeking for what
+it does not possess.
+
+Ask any middle-aged man of your acquaintance to tell you the years of
+the first woman he imagined he loved, and you will find you are
+following a beaten path.
+
+Because you are a worth while young man, with a bright future before
+you, I am, as I think of the matter, glad you selected me rather than
+some other less happy or considerate woman, as the object of your
+regard.
+
+An unhappy wife or an ambitious adventuress might mar your future, and
+leave you with lowered ideals and blasted prospects.
+
+You tell me in your letter that for "a day of life and love with me you
+would willingly give up the world and snap your fingers in the face of
+conventional society, and even face death with a laugh." It is easy for
+a passionate, romantic nature to work itself into a mood where those
+words are felt when written, and sometimes the mood carries a man and a
+woman through the fulfilment of such assertions. But invariably
+afterward comes regret, remorse, and disillusion.
+
+No man enjoys having the world take him at his word, when he says he is
+ready to give it up for the woman he loves.
+
+He wants the woman and the world, too.
+
+In the long run, he finds the world's respect more necessary to his
+continued happiness than the woman's society.
+
+Just recall the history of all such cases you have known, and you will
+find my assertions true.
+
+Thank your stars that I am not a reckless woman ready to take you at
+your word, and thank your stars, too, that I am not a free woman who
+would be foolish enough and selfish enough to harness a young husband to
+a mature wife. I know you resent this reference to the difference in our
+years, which may not be so marked to the observer to-day, but how would
+it be ten, fifteen years from now? There are few disasters greater for
+husband or wife than the marriage of a boy of twenty to a woman a dozen
+years his senior. For when he reaches thirty-five, despair and misery
+must almost inevitably face them both.
+
+You must forgive me when I tell you that one sentence in your letter
+caused a broad smile.
+
+That sentence was, "Would to God I had met you when you were free to be
+wooed and loved, as never man loved woman before."
+
+Now I have been married ten years, and you are twenty-three years old!
+You must blame my imagination (not my heart, which has no intention of
+being cruel) for the picture presented to my mind's eye by your wish.
+
+I saw myself in the full flower of young ladyhood, carrying at my side
+an awkward lad of a dozen years, attired in knickerbockers, and
+probably chewing a taffy stick, yet "wooing and loving as never man
+loved before."
+
+I suppose, however, the idea in your mind was that you wished Fate had
+made me of your own age, and left me free for you.
+
+But few boys of twenty-three are capable of knowing what they want in a
+life companion. Ten years from now your ideal will have changed.
+
+You are in love with love, life, and all womankind, my dear boy, not
+with me, your friend.
+
+Put away all such ideas, and settle down to hard study and serious
+ambitions, and seal this letter of yours, which I am returning with my
+reply, and lay it carefully away in some safe place. Mark it to be
+destroyed unopened in case of your death. But if you live, I want you to
+open, re-read and burn it on the evening before your marriage to some
+lovely girl, who is probably rolling a hoop to-day; and if I am living,
+I want you to write and thank me for what I have said to you here. I
+hardly expect you will feel like doing it now, but I can wait.
+
+Do not write me again until that time, and when we meet, be my good
+sensible friend--one I can introduce to my husband, for only such
+friends do I care to know.
+
+
+
+
+To Miss Winifred Clayborne
+
+_At Vassar College_
+
+
+My dear niece:--It was a pleasure to receive so long a letter from you
+after almost two years of silence. It hardly seems possible that you are
+eighteen years old. To have graduated from high school with such honours
+that you are able to enter Vassar at so early an age is much to your
+credit.
+
+I indulged in a good-natured laugh over your request for my advice
+regarding a college course. You say, "I remember that I once heard you
+state that you did not believe in higher education for women, and,
+therefore, I am anxious to have your opinion of this undertaking of
+mine."
+
+Now of course, my dear child, what you wish me to say is, that I am
+charmed with your resolution to graduate from Vassar. You have entered
+the college fully determined to take a complete course, and you surely
+would not like a discouraging or disapproving letter from your auntie.
+
+"Please give me your opinion of my course of action" always means,
+"Please approve of what I am doing."
+
+Well I _do_ approve. I always approve when a human being is carrying out
+a determination, even if I am confident it is the wrong determination.
+
+The really useful knowledge of life must come through strong
+convictions. Strong convictions are usually obtained only on the pathway
+of personal experience.
+
+To argue a man out of a certain course of action rarely argues away his
+own beliefs and desires in the matter. We may save him some bitter
+experience in the contemplated project, but he is almost certain to find
+that same bitter experience later, because he has been coerced, not
+enlightened.
+
+Had he gained his knowledge in the first instance, he would have escaped
+the later disaster.
+
+A college education does not seem to me the most desirable thing for a
+woman, unless she intends to enter into educational pursuits as a means
+of livelihood. I understand it is your intention to become a teacher,
+and, therefore, you are wise to prepare yourself by a thorough
+education. _Be the very best_, in whatever line of employment you enter.
+
+Scorn any half-way achievements. Make yourself a brilliantly educated
+woman, but look to it that in the effort you do not forget two other
+important matters--health and sympathy. My objection to higher education
+for women, which you once heard me express, is founded on the fact that
+I have met many college women who were anaemic and utterly devoid of
+emotion. One beautiful young girl I recall who at fourteen years of age
+seemed to embody all the physical and temperamental charms possible for
+womankind. Softly rounded features, vivid colouring, voluptuous curves
+of form, yet delicacy and refinement in every portion of her anatomy,
+she breathed love and radiated sympathy. I thought of her as the ideal
+woman in embryo; and the brightness of her intellect was the finishing
+touch to a perfect girlhood. I saw her again at twenty-four. She had
+graduated from an American college and had taken two years in a foreign
+institution of learning. She had carried away all the honours--but,
+alas, the higher education had carried away all her charms of person and
+of temperament. Attenuated, pallid, sharp-featured, she appeared much
+older than her years, and the lovely, confiding and tender qualities of
+mind, which made her so attractive to older people, had given place to
+cold austerity and hypercriticism.
+
+Men were only objects of amusement, indifference, or ridicule to her.
+Sentiment she regarded as an indication of crudity, emotion as an
+insignia of vulgarity. The heart was a purely physical organ, she knew
+from her studies in anatomy. It was no more the seat of emotion than
+the liver or lungs. The brain was the only portion of the human being
+which appealed to her, and "educated" people were the only ones who
+interested her, because they were capable of argument and discussion of
+intellectual problems--her one source of entertainment.
+
+Half an hour in the society of this over-trained young person left one
+exhausted and disillusioned with brainy women. I beg you to pay no such
+price for an education as this young girl paid. I remember you as a
+robust, rosy girl, with charming manners. Your mother was concerned, on
+my last visit, because I called you a pretty girl in your hearing. She
+said the one effort of her life was to rear a sensible Christian
+daughter with no vanity. She could not understand my point of view when
+I said I should regret it if a daughter of mine was without vanity, and
+that I should strive to awaken it in her. Cultivate enough vanity to
+care about your personal appearance and your deportment. No amount of
+education can recompense a woman for the loss of complexion, figure,
+or charm. And do not let your emotional and affectional nature grow
+atrophied.
+
+Control your emotions, but do not crucify them.
+
+Do not mistake frigidity for serenity, nor austerity for self-control.
+Be affable, amiable, and sweet, no matter how much you know. And listen
+more than you talk.
+
+The woman who knows how to show interest is tenfold more attractive than
+the woman who is for ever anxious to instruct. Learn how to call out the
+best in other people, and lead them to talk of whatever most interests
+them. In this way you will gain a wide knowledge of human nature, which
+is the best education possible. Try and keep a little originality of
+thought, which is the most difficult of all undertakings while in
+college; and, if possible, be as lovable a woman when you go forth into
+the world "finished" as when you entered the doors of your Alma Mater:
+for to be unlovable is a far greater disaster than to be uneducated.
+
+
+
+
+To Edna Gordon
+
+_During Her Honeymoon_
+
+
+I am very much flattered that you should write your first letter as Mrs.
+Gordon to me. Its receipt was a surprise, as I have known you so
+slightly--only when we were both guests under a friend's roof for one
+week.
+
+I had no idea that you were noticing me particularly at that time, there
+was such a merry crowd of younger people about you. How careful we
+matrons should be, when in the presence of debutantes, for it seems they
+are taking notes for future reference!
+
+I am glad that my behaviour and conversation were such that you feel you
+can ask me for instructions at this important period of your life. Here
+is the text you have given me:
+
+"_I want you to tell me, dear Mrs. West, how to be as happy, and loved,
+and loving, after fifteen years of married life, as you are. I so dread
+the waning of my honeymoon_."
+
+And now you want me to preach you a little sermon on this text. Well, my
+dear girl, I am at a disadvantage in not knowing you better, and not
+knowing your husband at all.
+
+Husbands are like invalids, each needs a special prescription, according
+to his ailment.
+
+But as all invalids can be benefited by certain sensible suggestions,
+like taking simple food, and breathing and exercising properly, and
+sleeping with open windows or out-of-doors, so all husbands can be aided
+toward perpetual affection by the observance of some general laws, on
+the part of the wife.
+
+I am, of course, to take it for granted that you have married a man with
+principles and ideals, a man who loves you and desires to make a good
+husband. I know you were not so unfortunate as to possess a large amount
+of property for any man to seek, and so I can rely upon the natural
+supposition that you were married for love.
+
+It might be worth your while, right now, while your husband's memory is
+fresh upon the subject, to ask him what particular characteristics first
+won his attention, and what caused him to select you for a life
+companion.
+
+Up to the present moment, perhaps, he has never told you any more
+substantial reason for loving you than the usual lovers'
+explanation--"Just because." But if you ask him to think it over, I am
+sure he can give you a more explicit answer.
+
+After you have found what qualities, habits, actions, or accomplishments
+attracted him, write them down in a little book and refer to them two or
+three times a year. On these occasions ask yourself if you are keeping
+these attractions fresh and bright as they were in the days of
+courtship. Women easily drop the things which won a man's heart, and are
+unconscious that the change they bemoan began in themselves. But do not
+imagine you can rest at ease after marriage with only the qualities,
+and charms, and virtues, which won you a lover. To keep a husband in
+love is a more serious consideration than to win a lover.
+
+You must add year by year to your attractions.
+
+As the deep bloom of first youth passes, you must cultivate mental and
+spiritual traits which will give your face a lustre from within.
+
+And as the mirth and fun of life drifts farther from you, and you find
+the merry jest, which of old turned care into laughter, less ready on
+your lip, you must cultivate a wholesome optimistic view of life, to
+sustain your husband through the trials and disasters besetting most
+mortal paths.
+
+Make one solemn resolve now, and never forget it. Say to yourself, "On
+no other spot, in no other house on earth, shall my husband find a more
+cheerful face, a more loving welcome, or a more restful atmosphere, than
+he finds at home."
+
+No matter what vicissitudes arise, and what complications occur, keep
+that resolve. It will at least help to sustain you with a sense of
+self-respect, if unhappiness from any outside source should shadow your
+life. An attractive home has become a sort of platitude in speech, but
+it remains a thing of vital importance, all the same, in actual life and
+in marriage.
+
+Think often and speak frequently to your husband of his good qualities
+and of the things you most admire in him.
+
+Sincere and judicious praise is to noble nature like spring rain and sun
+to the earth. Ignore or make light of his small failings, and when you
+must criticize a serious fault, do not dwell upon it. A husband and wife
+should endeavour to be such good friends that kindly criticism is
+accepted as an evidence of mutual love which desires the highest
+attainments for its object.
+
+But no man likes to think his wife has set about the task of making him
+over, and if you have any such intention I beg you to conceal it, and go
+about it slowly and with caution.
+
+A woman who knows how to praise more readily than she knows how to
+criticize, and who has the tact and skill to adapt herself to a man's
+moods and to find amusement and entertainment in his whims, can lead him
+away from their indulgence without his knowledge.
+
+Such women are the real reformers of men, though they scorn the word,
+and disclaim the effort.
+
+It is well to keep a man conscious that you are a refined and
+delicate-minded woman, yet do not insist upon being worshipped on a
+pedestal. It tires a man's neck to be for ever gazing upward, and
+statues are less agreeable companions than human beings.
+
+If you wish to be thought spotless marble, instead of warm flesh and
+blood, you should have gone into a museum, and refused marriage.
+Remember God knew what He was about, when He fashioned woman to be man's
+companion, mate, and mother of his children.
+
+Respect yourself in all those capacities, and regard the fulfilment of
+each duty as sacred and beautiful.
+
+Do not thrust upon the man's mind continually the idea that you are a
+vastly higher order of being than he is.
+
+He will reach your standard much sooner if you come half-way and meet
+him on the plane of common sense and human understanding. Meantime let
+him never doubt your abhorrence of vulgarity, and your distaste for the
+familiarity which breeds contempt.
+
+It is a great art, when a wife knows how to attract a husband year after
+year, with the allurements of the boudoir, and never to disillusion him
+with the familiarities of the dressing-room.
+
+Such women there are, who have lived with their lovers in poverty's
+close quarters, and through sickness and trouble, and yet have never
+brushed the bloom from the fruit of romance. But she who needs to be
+told in what this art consists, would never understand, and she who
+understands, need not be told.
+
+Keep your husband certain of the fact that his attention and society is
+more agreeable to you than that of any other man. But never beg for his
+attentions, and do not permit him to think you are incapable of enjoying
+yourself without his playing the devoted cavalier.
+
+The moment a man feels such an attitude is compulsory, it becomes
+irksome. Learn how to entertain yourself. Cling to your accomplishments
+and add others. A man admires a progressive woman who keeps step with
+the age. Study, and think, and read, and cultivate the art of listening.
+This will make you interesting to men and women alike, and your husband
+will hear you praised as an agreeable and charming woman, and that
+always pleases a man, as it indicates his good taste and good luck.
+
+Avoid giving your husband the impression that you expect a detailed
+account of every moment spent away from you. Convince him that you
+believe in his honour and loyalty, and that you have no desire to
+control or influence his actions in any matters which do not conflict
+with his self-respect or your pride.
+
+Cultivate the society of the women he admires. There is both wisdom and
+tact in such a course.
+
+Wisdom in making an ideal a reality, and tact in avoiding any semblance
+of that most unbecoming fault--jealousy.
+
+Let him see that you have absolute faith in your own powers to hold him,
+and that you respect him too much to mistake a frank admiration for an
+unworthy sentiment. Do not hesitate to speak with equal frankness of the
+qualities you admire in other men. Educate him in liberality and
+generosity, by example.
+
+Allow no one to criticize him in your presence, and do not discuss his
+weaknesses with others. I have known wives to meet in conclaves, and
+dissect husbands for an entire afternoon. And each wife seemed anxious
+to pose as the most neglected and unappreciated woman of the lot. With
+all the faults of the sterner sex, I never heard of such a caucus of
+husbands.
+
+Take an interest in your husband's business affairs, and sympathize with
+the cares and anxieties which beset him. Distract his mind with pleasant
+or amusing conversation, when you find him nervous and fagged in brain
+and body.
+
+Yet do not feel that you must never indicate any trouble of your own,
+for it is conducive to selfishness when a wife hides all her worries and
+indispositions to listen to those of her husband. But since the
+work-a-day world, outside the home, is usually filled with irritations
+for a busy man, it should be a wife's desire to make his home-coming a
+season of anticipation and joy.
+
+Do not expect a husband to be happy and contented with a continuous diet
+of love and sentiment and romance. He needs also much that is practical
+and commonplace mingled with his mental food.
+
+I have known an adoring young wife to irritate Cupid so he went out and
+sat on the door-step, contemplating flight, by continual neglect of
+small duties.
+
+There were never any matches in the receivers; when the husband wanted
+one he was obliged to search the house. The newspaper he had folded and
+left ready to read at leisure was used to light the fire, although an
+overfilled waste-basket stood near. The towel-rack was empty just when
+he wanted his bath, and his bedroom slippers were always kicked so far
+under the bed that he was obliged to crawl on all fours to reach them.
+
+Then his loving spouse was sure to want to be "cuddled" when he was
+smoking his cigar and reading,--a triple occupation only possible to a
+human freak, with three arms, four eyes, and two mouths.
+
+Therefore I would urge you, my dear Edna, to mingle the practical with
+the ideal, and common sense with sentiment, and tact with affection, in
+your domestic life.
+
+These general rules are all I can give to guide your barque into the
+smooth, sea of marital happiness.
+
+It is a wide sea, with many harbours and ports, and no two ships start
+from exactly the same point or take exactly the same course. You will
+encounter rocks and reefs, perhaps, which my boat escaped, and I have no
+chart to guide you away from those rocks.
+
+If I knew you better, and knew your husband at all, I might steer you a
+little farther out of Honeymoon Bay into calm waters, and tell you how
+to reef your sails, and how to tack at certain junctures of the voyage,
+and with the wind in certain directions.
+
+But if you keep your heart full of love, your mind clear of distrust,
+and your lips free from faultfinding, and if you pray for guidance and
+light upon your way, I am sure you cannot miss the course.
+
+
+
+
+To Miss Gladys Weston
+
+_Who Faces the Necessity to Earn a Living_
+
+
+It is indeed a problem, my dear Gladys, to face stern-visaged Necessity
+after walking with laughing-lipped Pleasure for twenty-two years.
+
+What an unforeseen event that your father should sink his fortune in a
+rash venture and die of remorse and discouragement scarcely six months
+after you were travelling through Europe with me, and laughing at my
+vain attempts to make you economize.
+
+You have acted the noble and womanly part, in using the last dollar of
+your father's property to pay his debts, and I could imagine you doing
+no other way.
+
+But now comes the need of earning a livelihood for yourself, and your
+delicate mother.
+
+I know you have gone over the list of your accomplishments and taken
+stock of all your inherited and acquired qualities. You play the piano
+well, but in these days of Paderewskies and pianolas, no one wants to
+employ a young girl music-teacher. You do not sing, and if you did, that
+would not afford you a means of support. The best of natural voices need
+a fortune spent before half a fortune can be earned.
+
+You dance like a fairy, and swim like a mermaid, and ride like an Indian
+princess, but these accomplishments are not lucrative, save in a Midway
+Plaisance or a Wild West show. You are well educated and your memory is
+remarkable. You have a facility in mathematics, and your knowledge of
+grammar and rhetoric will, as you say, enable you to pass the
+examination for a teacher in the public schools after a little brushing
+up and study. Then, with the political influence of your father's old
+friends, you will no doubt be able to obtain a position.
+
+I recollect you as surpassingly skilful with the needle. I know you
+once saw a charming morning gown in Paris which I persuaded you not to
+buy at the absurd price asked for it, after the merchant understood we
+were Americans. And I remember how you passed to another department,
+purchased materials, went home to our hotel, and cut and made a
+surprising imitation of the gown at one-tenth the cost.
+
+Why have you not considered turning this talent to account? Though the
+world goes to war and ruin, yet women will dress, and the need of good
+seamstresses ever exists.
+
+Go to some enterprising half-grown Western or interior Eastern town,
+announce yourself in possession of all the Paris styles (as you are),
+and launch out. Increase your prices gradually, and go abroad on your
+savings at the end of a year, then come back with new ideas, a larger
+stock, and higher prices.
+
+You will be on the road to fortune, and can retire with a competence
+before you are middle-aged. A little skill with the scissors and
+needle, lots of courage and audacity, and original methods will make a
+woman succeed in this line of endeavour.
+
+But why do I not approve of the profession upon which you have almost
+decided--that of teaching--you ask.
+
+I will tell you why.
+
+Next to motherhood, the profession of teacher in public or private
+schools is the most important one on earth.
+
+It is, in a certain sense, more responsible than that of motherhood,
+since the work of poor and bad mothers must be undone by the teacher,
+and where the mother has three or four children for a period of years to
+influence, the teacher has hundreds continually. There are very few
+perfect teachers. There are too few excellent ones. There are too many
+poor ones. I do not believe you possess the requisites for the calling.
+
+A teacher should first of all love children as a class. Their
+dependence, their ignorance, their helplessness, and their unformed
+characters should appeal to a woman's mind, and make her forget their
+many and varied faults and irritating qualities. You like lovable,
+well-bred, and interesting children, but you are utterly indifferent to
+all others. You adore beauty, and an ugly child offends your taste. A
+stupid child irritates you.
+
+You have a wonderful power of acquiring and remembering information, but
+you do not possess the knack of readily imparting it. You expect others
+to grasp ideas in the same way you do. This will make you unsympathetic
+and impatient as a teacher. You have no conception of the influence a
+teacher exerts upon children in public schools. You were educated in
+private schools and at home, I know. I attended the country public
+school, and to this day I can recall the benefits and misfortunes which
+resulted to me from association with different teachers. Children are
+keenly alive to the moods of teachers and are often adepts in
+mind-reading.
+
+A teacher should be able to enter into the hearts and souls of the
+children under her charge, and she should find as great pleasure in
+watching their minds develop as the musical genius in watching a
+composition grow under his touch.
+
+An infinite number of things not included in the school routine should
+be taught by teachers. Courtesy, kindness to dependents and weaker
+creatures, a horror of cruelty in all forms, a love of nature,
+politeness to associates, low speaking and light walking, cleanliness
+and refinement of manner,--all these may be imparted by a teacher who
+loves to teach, without extra time or fatigue. I fear a proud disdain,
+and a scarcely hidden disgust, would be plainly visible in your
+demeanour toward the majority of the untrained little savages given to
+your charge in a public school. You have not the love of humanity at
+large in your heart, nor the patience and perseverance to make you take
+an optimistic view in the colossal work of developing the minds of
+children. Therefore it seems to me almost a sin for you to undertake
+the profession merely because you need to earn a living. There are other
+things to be considered besides your necessities. Fond as I am of you, I
+have the betterment of humanity at my heart, too, and cannot feel it is
+right for you to place yourself in a position where you will not be
+doing the best for those dependent upon you that could be done.
+
+I have given up hope of seeing mothers made to realize their
+responsibilities. But I still have hope of the teachers. On them and
+their full understanding of all it is in their power to do, lies the
+hope of the world.
+
+Therefore, my dear girl, I urge you to take up dressmaking or millinery
+instead of school-teaching.
+
+If you ruin a piece of goods in the making, you can replace it and
+profit by your error. But if you mar a child's nature in your attempt to
+teach him, you have done an irreparable injury not only to him but to
+humanity.
+
+If you saw a design started by a lace-maker, you would not think of
+taking the work and attempting to complete it until you had learned the
+art of lace-making.
+
+Just so you ought not to think of developing the wonderful intricacies
+of a child's mind until you have learned how.
+
+It is all right to deliberately choose a vocation which gives us contact
+only with inanimate things, but we have no right to take the handling of
+human souls unless we are specially fitted for the task.
+
+
+
+
+To Clarence St. Claire
+
+_Regarding His Sister's Betrothal_
+
+
+Your request, my dear Clarence, that I try to influence your sister to
+change her determination in this matter, calls for some very plain
+statements from me.
+
+I have known you and Elise since you were playing with marbles and
+rattles, and your mother and I have been very good acquaintances
+(scarcely intimate enough to be called friends) for more than a score of
+years. You are very much like your mother, both in exterior appearance
+and in mind. Elise is the image of her father at the time he captured
+your mother's romantic fancy, and as I recollect him when he died.
+
+You were five years old, Elise three, at that time. Your mother lived
+with your father six years in months, an eternity in experience. You
+know that she was unhappy, and that he disillusioned her with love, and
+almost with life. He married your mother solely for her fortune. She was
+a sweet and beautiful girl, of excellent family, but your father had no
+qualities of mind or soul which enabled him to appreciate or care for
+any woman, save as she could be of use to him, socially and financially.
+
+In six years he managed to dispose of all but a mere pittance of her
+fortune, and humiliated her in a thousand ways besides. His only decent
+act was to die and leave her undisturbed for the remainder of her life.
+Your uncle assisted in her support and saved the remnant of her
+property, so that she has, by careful and rigorous economy, been able to
+educate you and Elise, and keep up a respectable appearance in a quiet
+way.
+
+Of course it was impossible to retain her place among the associates of
+her better days, and you know how bitter this fact has always made
+Elise. Your sister has the physical beauty and the overwhelming love of
+money and power which characterized your father. She has a modicum of
+your mother's sense of honour, but has been reared in a way not
+calculated to develop much strength of character. Your mother has been a
+slave to your sister. Elise is incapable of a deep, intense love for any
+man, and your mother's pessimistic ideas of love and marriage have still
+further acted upon her brain cells and atrophied whatever impulses may
+have been latent in her nature, to love and be loved. These qualities
+might have been developed had Elise been under the tutelage of some one
+versed in the science of brain building, but your mother, like most
+mothers, was not aware of the tremendous possibilities within her grasp,
+or of the effect of the ideas she expressed in the hearing of her
+children. Neither did she seem to recognize the father's traits in
+Elise, and undertake the work of eliminating them, as she might have
+done. She has been an unselfish and devoted mother, and has made too
+many sacrifices for Elise. At the same time, she has awakened the mind
+of your sister to ideals of principle and honour which will help her to
+be a better woman than her inheritance from your father would otherwise
+permit. But now, at the age of twenty-one, it is impossible to hope that
+she will develop into a self-sacrificing, loving, womanly woman, whose
+happiness can be found in a peaceful domestic life. She has seen your
+mother sad and despondent, under the yoke of genteel poverty, and heard
+her bemoan her lost privileges of wealth and station. This, added to her
+natural craving for money and place, renders a wealthy marriage her only
+hope of happiness on earth.
+
+Mr. Volney has an enormous fortune. He is, as you say, a senile old man
+in his dotage. As you say again, such a marriage is a travesty. But
+Elise is incapable of feeling the love which alone renders marriage a
+holy institution. She has undesirable qualities which ought not to be
+transmitted to children, and she is absolutely devoid of maternal
+instincts.
+
+I have heard her say she would consider motherhood the greatest
+disaster which could befall her. But she is unfitted for a
+self-supporting career, and she wants a home and position.
+
+She has beauty, kind and generous impulses, and a love of playing Lady
+Bountiful. It is not so much that she wants to benefit the needy, as
+that she likes to place people under obligations and to have them look
+up to her as a superior being.
+
+Old Mr. Volney is a miser, and his money is doing no one good. He has
+only distant relatives, and by taking Elise for a wife (according to
+law) he will wrong no one, and she will make much better use of his
+fortune than his heirs would make.
+
+Your mother will be relieved of worry and care. Many worthy poor people
+and charities will receive help, and Elise will have her heart's
+desire--fine apparel, jewels, a social position, and no one to bother
+her. The valet and nurse will look after Mr. Volney, and his simple old
+heart will bask in the pride of an old man--the possession of a pretty
+young wife.
+
+Had he full use of his mental faculties, and did he long for love and
+devotion, I would try and dissuade Elise from the marriage, but solely
+on _his_ account, not on hers.
+
+The young man you mention, as your choice of a suitor for the hand of
+your sister, might better go up in a balloon to seek for Eutopia than to
+expect happiness as her husband. He has a sweet, gentle, loving nature,
+a taste for quiet home joys, fondness for children, and he has two
+thousand a year, with small prospects of more in the near future.
+
+He should marry a modest, domestic girl, with tastes similar to his own,
+and with no overweening ambitions. Elise would simply drive him mad in a
+year's time, with her restless discontent, her extravagance, and her
+desire for the expensive pleasures of earth. It is useless to reason
+with her, or to expect her to model her ideas to suit her circumstances.
+Inheritance and twenty-one years of wrong education must be taken into
+consideration. What would mean happiness for many women would mean
+misery for her. I can imagine no more dreadful destiny than to be tied
+to a senile old man by a legal ceremony, even were I given his millions
+in payment. But that will mean happiness to Elise.
+
+I think we should let people seek their own ideals of happiness, when
+they break no law, and injure no other life by it.
+
+I shall congratulate Elise by this post on having made so fortunate an
+alliance. I could not congratulate her were she to marry her young
+suitor. I shall congratulate your mother on having nothing to worry
+about, regarding the future of Elise.
+
+And I advise you to take a philosophical view of the situation, and to
+remember that, in judging the actions of our fellow beings, we must take
+their temperaments, characteristics, and environment into consideration,
+not our own.
+
+You have made the very common error of thinking, because Elise is a
+handsome young girl, that love, and home, and children would mean
+happiness to her.
+
+Women vary as greatly as do plants and flowers in their needs. The
+horticulturist knows that he cannot treat them all alike, and he studies
+their different requirements.
+
+To some he gives moisture and sun, to some shade, and to some dry, sandy
+soil. The thistle pushes forth a gorgeous bloom from an arid bed. It
+would die in the pond where the lily thrives.
+
+Too much sentiment is wasted in this world and too much effort expended
+in trying to make all people happy in some one way.
+
+When I was a little girl, a Sunday-school superintendent presented every
+girl in the class with a doll, and each doll was exactly the same. Most
+little girls like dolls, but I never played with one, as they were
+always so hopelessly inanimate. If the good man had given me a sled, or
+a book, or a picture, I would have been happy. As it was, his gift was a
+failure. You want to present your sister with a devoted young husband,
+a cottage, and several children, because you think every woman should
+possess these things. Your sister happens to be one who prefers a
+wealthy old invalid.
+
+Let her have what she wants, my dear Clarence, and let her work out her
+destiny in her own way. She will do less harm in the world than if you
+forced her into your way. Now you must remember that you asked me to
+help you in this matter, and I could only write you the absolute facts
+of the situation, as I knew it to be. I feel fairly confident that you
+will accept my point of view, and act as best man at your sister's
+wedding.
+
+
+
+
+To Miss Margaret Riley
+
+_Shop Girl, Concerning Her Oppressors_
+
+
+Your letter has been destroyed, as you requested, and you need not fear
+my betraying your confidence.
+
+Your mother was so long in my employ that I feel almost like a
+foster-mother to you, having seen you grow up from the cradle to
+self-supporting young womanhood.
+
+The troubles and evils which you mention as existing about you, I know
+to be quite universal in all large shops, factories, and department
+stores, indeed in all houses where the two sexes are employed.
+
+I know that a certain order of men in power use that power to lower the
+ideals and standards of womanhood when they can.
+
+A pretty young girl once in my service related to me the cold-blooded
+suggestions made to her by her employer to increase the miserable wage
+paid her in a sweat-shop.
+
+The sacrifice of her virtue seemed no more to this man than the sale of
+an old garment.
+
+The girl did not make the sacrifice, however, and she did not starve,
+freeze, or die. She managed to exist and to better her condition by
+doing domestic work and saving her money to fit herself for more
+congenial employment. When I last saw her she was planning to become a
+trained nurse, and had paid for a course of instruction in massage. I
+tell you this merely to illustrate a fact I fully believe, that any girl
+who is determined to live an honourable life and retain her self-respect
+can make her way in the world and rise from lesser to higher positions,
+if she is patient and willing to do what is termed menial work as a
+stepping-stone. You tell me that scores of girls are kept in poorly
+paying, inferior positions when capable of filling better places,
+simply because they will not accept the dishonourable attentions of some
+of the men in authority.
+
+You beg me to arouse the good women of America to a crusade against what
+you say is a growing evil and to boycott such shops and stores.
+
+But you ask me to do what is an impracticable thing.
+
+You would not like to be called as a witness were this matter brought
+before the courts. Were all the good women of America to begin such a
+crusade, where would they obtain the proofs of their accusations?
+
+And even if the witnesses were ready, there is not a newspaper in the
+land that would dare champion the reform. And no great reform can be
+made without the aid of the press. The daily papers, as you say, give
+columns to protests against lesser evils, but you must know that these
+newspapers are largely supported by the profitable advertisements of
+manufactories and dry-goods houses. Glance over the columns of any of
+our large dailies and see how much space such advertising occupies.
+
+Imagine what it would mean to lose all this high-priced patronage.
+Therefore, even if the most moral of editors knew that these
+establishments were undermining our social conditions and invading our
+homes, I doubt if he could be induced to make a protest. It is a curious
+thing to see how many are the kinds of victims caught and held in the
+clutches of the money-devil-fish in our wonderful land of freedom.
+
+Even clergymen who are preaching morality and brotherly love are
+compelled to keep their mouths shut on certain evils and abuses, lest
+they offend the pillars of the church and deprive the treasury of its
+income.
+
+In a certain New England town famous for its educational institution, a
+clergyman denounced a corporation which had swindled the poor and
+deceived scores of citizens. He was requested to discontinue further
+references to the matter, as the church treasury was supplied by the
+money which accrued from this monopoly.
+
+The most powerful members of the church were officers in the
+corporation.
+
+The young clergyman sent in his resignation and gave up an assured
+salary to follow the light of his own conscience. But there are few with
+his bravery and, therefore, the strongholds of selfishness and
+self-indulgence remain impregnable. While we admire the splendid
+character which makes a man capable of refusing a salary which means
+hush-money, we can at the same time understand the difficult position of
+a clergyman with a hungry brood of children to support, who hesitates at
+such a move. We can understand how he argues with himself, that by
+taking the money of the monopolists, he is able to do more good for
+humanity than by refusing it, and losing both influence and income. It
+is a false argument, yet the worn and weary mind of the average orthodox
+minister will accept it as the advisable course to pursue. So you will
+see how difficult is the task you suggest my undertaking. You tell me
+that it is useless for you to leave one shop and go to another, as all
+are more or less conducted on the same lines; and that it is mere chance
+if a girl finds herself in a position where she can advance on her
+merits. Even then a sudden change in heads of departments some day may
+destroy all her hopes.
+
+You say I have no idea how many girls go wrong just through the
+persecution and tyranny of these men--forced to fall in order to keep
+herself fed and clothed. I repeat what I said already in this
+connection,--that I am certain any girl determined to keep herself above
+reproach and ambitious to rise in the world can do so. She may have to
+endure many privations and sorrows for a time, and that time may seem
+long and weary, _but a change will come for the better as surely as
+spring follows winter, if she does not waver_.
+
+If you will look carefully into the facts of the cases which fall under
+your observation, I am confident you will see that it is vanity and
+indolence, not hunger and oppression, which cause the majority of the
+girls you mention to go astray. They desire to make as good an
+appearance, and to be given the same privileges of leisure, as the
+favourite who has been promoted through unworthy methods.
+
+You tell me you would rather jump from Brooklyn Bridge and end the
+struggle at once than lose your self-respect, but that you are weary of
+seeing the girls with less conscience, and lesser capabilities, pushed
+ahead of you and your worthy associates. Yet I am certain from the tone
+of your letter that you will never forget your self-respect, and I have
+faith that you can make your way in the world in spite of all the
+designing masculine oppressors in existence.
+
+So will any woman, who sets her mark high, and believes in the
+invincible power of her own spirit to conquer all the demons of earth.
+
+Do not imagine your position is one of unusual trial and temptation. A
+young actress of my acquaintance has been obliged to fight her way
+slowly to partial recognition because she would not accept the
+conditions offered, with leading roles and fine wardrobe, by two
+polygamous-minded managers.
+
+She is making her way, however, and the very battle she is fighting with
+life has strengthened her powers as an artist. A young stenographer has
+been compelled to give up two positions because she would not allow the
+loverlike attentions of married employers. She was called a silly prude
+and discharged. Yet she is occupying an excellent position with a clean
+high-class business house to-day.
+
+Domestics are sometimes driven from private homes by the same pursuit of
+the employer. Men are only in a state of evolution, and the animal
+instincts are still strong in them. The world has allowed them so much
+license, and society has been so lenient with their misdeeds, that it
+has been difficult for them to practise self-control and aspire to a
+higher standard. You must be sorry for them and do what you can to help
+them understand the worth and value of true womanhood. Never for one
+instant believe that you can be hindered by the machinations of a few
+unworthy men, from reaching any goal you set.
+
+One good, intelligently virtuous woman, determined to make the most of
+her capabilities by fair methods, can overcome a whole army of
+self-indulgent, sensual men, and compel them to doff their hats to her.
+I am always deeply sympathetic toward the girl who is tempted through
+her emotions, or her affections, to forget herself. But I have no great
+pity for the woman who sells herself. There are always charitable
+societies, and there are always menial labours to do, and either door of
+escape from the sale of honour would be sought by the girl of right
+ideals. It is a bitter experience to see the woman who _has_ stepped
+down into the soil of life flaunting her finery and her power in the
+face of virtue. But look about you and see how soon the finery becomes
+tatters--how soon the power is transferred to another.
+
+Woman's position in the world is growing better, brighter, and more
+independent with each year. There are more avenues open to her--larger
+opportunities waiting for the employment of her abilities. She has tried
+a thorny path for centuries, but she has small reason to despair of her
+outlook to-day.
+
+Each woman must fight her battle alone, and walk by the light from
+within.
+
+The world gives her only a superficial protection, either through its
+courts or its society.
+
+Men demand virtue from woman and endeavour in every way to lead her away
+from its path.
+
+But the divinity within her can carry her to the heights, if she will
+not be lured by the voice of the senses, or frightened by the demands of
+the appetite, or debased by the mercenary spirit of the age.
+
+Go on in your brave determination to lead a sensible and moral life, my
+dear girl, and let your example be a guide to others, and prove that
+woman may succeed on the right basis if she will, in spite of
+temptations and oppressions.
+
+
+
+
+To Miss Gladys Weston
+
+_After Three Years as a Teacher_
+
+
+The way you took my frank criticisms and doubts of your ability to make
+a good school-teacher, proves you to be a girl of much character. Your
+success proves, too, that given the general qualifications of a fairly
+capable and educated human being, add concentration and will, and we can
+achieve wonders in any line of work we undertake. I am still of the
+opinion that no woman of my acquaintance was more wholly unfit to teach
+young children, as they should be taught, than your fair self as I last
+knew you.
+
+I take pride in believing that my heroic methods were what brought out
+the undeveloped qualities you needed to ensure such success.
+
+There are certain natures that need to be antagonized before they do
+their best. Others are prostrated and robbed of all strength by a
+criticism or a doubt.
+
+You have realized this, I am sure, in your experiences with pupils.
+"_You cannot do it_" is a more stimulating war-cry to some people than
+"_You can_." And to such the sneer of the foe does more good, than the
+smile of the friend. A phrenologist would tell us that strongly
+developed organs of self-esteem and love of approbation accompanied this
+trait of character.
+
+I am sure it proves to be the case with you.
+
+Brought up as you were, the only child of indulgent parents, and given
+admiration and praise by all your associates, you could hardly reach the
+age of twenty-two without having developed self-esteem and love of
+praise. You were naturally brighter than most of your companions. (They
+were also children of fortune, as the term goes, but to my idea the
+children reared in wealth, are usually children of misfortune. For the
+real fortune of life is to encounter the discipline which brings out
+our strongest qualities.)
+
+Your father was a poor boy, who fought his way up to wealth and power
+before you were born; but he unfortunately wanted the earth beside, and
+so died in poverty after staking all he had, which was enough, to make
+more, which he did not need.
+
+You inherit much of his force of character, and that is what gave you
+the reputation of extreme cleverness among your more commonplace
+companions. Compared with the really brilliant and talented people of
+earth, you are not clever. That is why I found you so companionable and
+charming, no doubt; for the brilliant people--especially women--are
+rarely companionable for more than a few hours at a time. I gave you
+that supreme test of friendship--the companionship of travel for a
+period of months. And I loved you better at the end of the time than at
+the beginning.
+
+I have often thought how much less occupation there would be for the
+divorce courts and how many more "indefinitely postponed" announcements
+of engagements would result from an established custom of a
+pre-betrothal trip!
+
+If a young man and woman who were enamoured could travel for two or
+three months, with a chaperon (in the shape of a mother-in-law or two),
+the lawyers would lose much profit; but I fear race suicide might ensue.
+Nothing, unless it is the sick-room or the card-table, brings out the
+real characteristics of human beings like travel.
+
+The irritating delays of boats and trains, and the still more irritating
+unresponsiveness of officials, when asked the cause, will test the
+temper and the patience of even a pair of lovers. It is not surprising
+if the traveller does lose both at times, but it is admirable if he does
+not. I remember how adorable you were, while I was a bundle of dynamite,
+ready to explode and send the stolid, uncommunicative conductor and
+brakemen into a journey through space, when we suffered that long delay
+coming from California. It is due the travelling public to explain such
+delays, but the railroads of America have grown to feel that they owe no
+explanation to any one, even to God, for what they do or do not. While I
+lost vitality and composure by such idle reflections, you were amusing
+the nervous travellers by your bright bits of narrative and ready
+repartee. That fortunate fellow you have promised to marry at the end of
+two years has no idea what a charming companion he will find in you for
+travel.
+
+It is interesting to have you say you feel that you need two more years
+as a teacher, before you are fully developed enough to take up the
+responsibilities of marriage. You will be twenty-seven then:--that is
+the age at which the average American girl begins to be most
+interesting, and the age when she is first physically mature.
+
+And your children will be more fully endowed mentally than if you had
+become a mother in your teens.
+
+As a rule the brainy people of the world are not born of very youthful
+parents; you will find youth gives physique, maturity gives brains to
+offspring.
+
+I did not quite finish my train of reasoning about your self-esteem.
+
+It was because you had always believed yourself to be capable of doing
+anything you undertook to do, that you were roused by my assertion that
+you could not make a good school-teacher, to attempt it. I hurt your
+pride a bit, and you were determined to prove me wrong. Had you been
+self-depreciating and oversensitive, what I said would have turned you
+from that field of effort. And that would have been a desirable result,
+since one who can be turned from any undertaking _ought to be_.
+
+I still think the world has lost a wonderful artist by your not entering
+the lists of designers and dressmakers. But since my recital of the
+faults which would prevent your success as a teacher led you to overcome
+them, I am proud and glad, that you have gone on in the work you
+contemplated. Good teachers are more needed than good dressmakers.
+
+And you are sweet and charming as usual, to tell me that your
+popularity with children and parents, is greatly due to that letter of
+mine.
+
+What you write me of the young girl who is making you so much trouble by
+her jealousy of all other pupils, interests and saddens me. Her devotion
+to you is of that morbid type, so unwholesome and so dangerous to her
+peace, and the peace of all her associates. It is a misfortune that
+mothers do not take such traits in early babyhood, and eradicate them by
+patient, practical methods. Instead, this mother, like many others,
+seems to think her little girl should be favoured and flattered because
+of her morbid tendency.
+
+She mistakes selfishness, envy, greediness, and hysteria for a loving
+nature.
+
+I can imagine your feelings when this mother told you with a proud
+smile, "Allie always wants the whole attention of any one she loves, and
+cannot stand sharing her friends. She was always that way at home. We
+never could pet her little brother without her going into a spasm. And
+you must be careful about showing the other children attention before
+her. It just breaks her heart--she is so sensitive."
+
+Oh, mothers, mothers, what are you thinking about, to be so blind to the
+work put in your hands to do?
+
+You have little time comparatively to work upon this perverted young
+mind: but under no conditions favour her, and, no matter what scenes she
+makes, continue to give praise and affection to the other children when
+it is their due. The prominence of her parents in the neighbourhood, and
+the power her father wields in the school board, need not worry you. Go
+ahead and do what is best for the child and for the school at large.
+Never deviate one inch from your convictions. Take Allie some day to a
+garden where there are many flowers, and talk to her about them. Speak
+of all their different charms, and gather a bouquet. Then say to her,
+"Now, Allie, you and I love each of these pretty flowers, and see how
+sweetly they nestle together in your hand. Not one is jealous of the
+other. Each has its place, and would be missed were it not there. The
+bouquet needs them all. Just so I need all the dear children in my
+school, and just so I would miss any one. It makes me ashamed to think
+any little girl is more selfish and unreasonable than a plant, for
+little girls are a higher order of creation, and we expect more of them
+than we expect of plants or of animals. All are parts of God, but the
+human kingdom is the highest expression of the Creator.
+
+"When you show such jealousy of other children I lose respect for you,
+and cannot love you as much as I love them. When you are gentle and
+good, and take your share of my love and attention, and let others have
+their share, then I am proud of you and fond of you. Suppose one plant
+said to the sunlight that it must have all the sun, would not that be
+ridiculous and selfish?"
+
+I would make frequent references to this idea when alone with her, and
+indeed it would serve as an excellent subject for a talk to all your
+pupils some day. Then try and make Allie understand how unbecoming and
+unlovable jealousy is, and how it renders a man or woman an object of
+pity and ridicule to others.
+
+Praise the people you know who are liberal and broad, and absolutely
+ignore her moods when in school.
+
+Perhaps in time you can do a little toward awakening her mind to a more
+wholesome outlook.
+
+What you tell me of her hysterical devotion to one of her classmates,
+makes me realize that the girl needs careful guidance.
+
+You should talk to her mother, and warn her against encouraging such
+conditions of mind in her child.
+
+Urge her to keep the girl occupied, and to give her much out-door life,
+and to teach her that pronounced demonstrations of affection are not
+good form between young girls. The mother should be careful what books
+she reads, and should see that she makes no long visits to other homes
+and receives no guests for a continued time. The child needs to
+cultivate universal love, not individual devotion.
+
+Ideals, principles, ambitions, should be given the girl, not close
+companions, for her nature is like a rank, weedy flower that needs
+refining and cultivating into a perfected blossom.
+
+All this needs a mother's constant care and tact and watchfulness. It is
+work she should have begun when her little girl first indicated her
+unfortunate tendencies.
+
+It is late for you to undertake a reconstruction of the misshapen
+character, but you may be able to begin an improvement, and if you can
+obtain the mother's cooperation the full formation may be accomplished.
+
+And do not fail to use mental suggestion constantly, and to help the
+child by your assertions to be what you want her to become. Dwell in
+conversation with her and in her presence, upon the lovableness and
+charm of generosity of spirit in general, rather than on the selfishness
+you observe in herself.
+
+At her least indication of an improvement, give her warm praise. Be
+careful about bestowing caresses upon her, as she needs to be guarded
+against hysteria, I should judge from your description. To some children
+they are the sunlight, to others miasma.
+
+Think of yourself as God's agent, given charge of his unfinished work,
+and recognize the unseen influences ready to aid you with suggestion and
+courage when you appeal to them.
+
+
+
+
+To a Young Friend
+
+_Who Has Become Interested in the Metaphysical Thoughts of the Day_
+
+Your letter bubbled with enthusiasm, and steamed with optimism. I am
+rejoiced that you have come into so healthful a line of thought, for I
+know of no one who was in more immediate need of it than you, when we
+last met.
+
+As your hostess, I could not tell you how wearing to the nerves your
+continual reverting to your physical ills became: and I hope I did not
+seem wholly unsympathetic to you when I so frequently made the effort to
+change the conversation to more cheerful topics.
+
+And now you tell me that you are astounded to find how universal is this
+topic with all classes, and on all occasions when one or two human
+beings gather together even in "His name." Your recital of the church
+sewing-bee, where all the good Christian women described their diseases
+and the different operations they and their friends had undergone, is as
+amusing as it is distressingly realistic.
+
+What a pity that the old theology fostered the idea that God especially
+loved the people he afflicted with illness and poverty and trouble! It
+has filled the world with egotistical and selfish invalids and idlers,
+who have believed they were "God's chosen ones," instead of realizing
+that they were the natural results of broken laws, which might be mended
+by the aid of the God-power in themselves, once they understood it.
+
+How Christians have reconciled the idea of a God of love with a God who
+wanted his chosen ones to be sick and poor, is a problem I cannot solve.
+
+Of course you are well, and growing stronger daily, now that you realize
+the fact that God made only health, wealth, and love, and that he
+intended all his children to share his opulence.
+
+As soon as the mind is filled with a dominating idea, no lesser ones can
+find lodgment therein.
+
+A woman of my acquaintance suffered agonies from seasickness.
+
+She crossed the ocean twice each year, yet seemed unable to accustom
+herself to the experience.
+
+On her last voyage her child fell dangerously sick with typhoid fever on
+the second day out at sea.
+
+So wrought up was the mother, and so filled with the thought of her
+child, that she never felt one moment's seasickness. Her mind was
+otherwise occupied.
+
+Now you have filled your mind with a consciousness of your divine right
+to health and happiness, and the thought of sickness and disease has no
+room.
+
+Yet do not be discouraged if you feel the old ailments and
+indispositions returning at times. A complete change in mental habits,
+is difficult to obtain in a moment.
+
+Be satisfied to grow slowly. A wise philosopher has said, "It is not in
+never falling that we show our strength, but in our ability to rise
+after repeated falls, and to continue our journey in triumph."
+
+Avoid talking your belief to every individual you meet. It will be
+breaking your string of pearls for the feet of swine to tread upon.
+Those who are ready for these truths will indicate the fact to you, and
+then will be your time for speech. And when you do speak, say little,
+and say it briefly and to the point.
+
+Leave some things for other minds to study out alone. The people who are
+not ready for higher ideals of religion and life, will only ridicule or
+combat your theories and beliefs, if you force them to listen.
+
+Wait until you have fully illustrated by your own conduct of life, that
+you have something beside vague theories to prove your statements of the
+power of the mind to conquer circumstance. The world is full to-day of
+bedraggled and haggard men and women, who are talking loudly of the
+power of mind to restore youth and health, and bestow riches and
+success.
+
+Do not add yourself to the unlovely and tiresome army of talkers, until
+you prove yourself a doer.
+
+And even after you have shown a record of health and prosperity and
+usefulness, let your silent influence speak louder than your uttered
+words.
+
+The moment a philosopher becomes a bore, he ceases to be a philosopher.
+
+
+
+
+To Wilfred Clayborn
+
+_Concerning His Education and His Profession_
+
+
+My Dear Nephew:--I have considered your request from all sides, and have
+resolved to disappoint you. This seems to me the kindest thing I can do
+under the circumstances.
+
+You have gone through two years of college life, and I am sure you are
+not an ignoramus. Most of the great men of the world's history have
+enjoyed no fuller educational advantages. To lend you money to finish
+the college course, would be to help you to start life at the age of
+twenty-two under the burden of debt. If you are determined to finish a
+college course, and feel that only by so doing will you equip yourself
+for the duties of life, I would advise you to drop out for a year and
+teach, or go into any kind of work which will enable you to earn enough
+to proceed with your studies. However hard and however disappointing
+this advice seems to you, I know it suggests a course which will do more
+for your character than all the money I could lend you.
+
+Aside from the fact that you would begin life with a debt, is the
+possibility of your contracting the debt habit.
+
+One man in a thousand who borrows money to help himself along in early
+life is benefited by it.
+
+The other 999 are harmed.
+
+To do anything on another's money is to lean on the shoulder of another
+instead of walking upright. It is not good calisthenic exercise.
+
+A few years ago I would have acceded to your request.
+
+But each year I live I realize more and more that lending money is the
+last method to be used in helping people to better themselves. In almost
+every case where I have lent money, I have lived to regret it. Not
+because I lost my money (which has usually been the fact), but because
+I lost respect for my friends.
+
+I remember the case of a young newspaper man and author, who came to me
+for the loan of five dollars. I had never seen him before, but I knew
+his brother, a brilliant playwright, in a social way.
+
+The young man told me he had met with a series of disasters on the
+voyage to New York, and was stranded there absolutely penniless,
+although money would come at almost any hour from his brother.
+
+Besides this, he showed me letters from editors who had taken work which
+would be paid for on publication.
+
+"I do not know any one here," the young man said, "and to-day, when I
+used my last twenty-five cents, I thought of you in desperation.
+
+"Your acquaintance with my brother would serve as an introduction, I
+felt, and I was confident you would realize my straits when I told you
+my errand."
+
+Of course I lent the young man five dollars. "I am sure it must be a
+great humiliation for you to ask for this," I said, "and I am certain
+you will repay it, though many former experiences have made me question
+the memory of friends and strangers to whom I have been of similar
+assistance."
+
+One week later the young man called to tell me he had not been able to
+do more than keep himself sustained at lunch-counters since he called,
+but hoped soon to obtain a position on a daily newspaper.
+
+That was ten years ago. The young man sat in an orchestra chair the
+other night at the theatre directly in front of me, and his attire was
+faultlessly up to date. From the costume of his companion, I should
+judge their carriage waited outside.
+
+The young man did not seem to recognize me, and no doubt the incident I
+mention has escaped his memory.
+
+In all probability I was but one of a score of people who helped him
+with small loans. Had the young man had been forced to appeal to the
+society organized in every city for aiding the deserving poor, by being
+sent disappointed from my door, the ordeal would have so hurt his pride,
+that he might not have become the professional borrower he undoubtedly
+is.
+
+I could relate innumerable cases of a similar nature. One man, who was a
+fashionable teacher of French among the millionaires of New York for
+several seasons, appealed to me at a time of year when all his patrons
+were out of the city for a loan to enable him to give his wife medical
+treatment.
+
+He was to repay it in the autumn. Instead, he came to me then with a
+much more distressing story of immediate need and seeming proof of money
+coming to him in a few months. To my chagrin, the loan I advanced was
+employed in giving a feast to friends at his daughter's wedding, after
+which he obliterated himself from my vision.
+
+Financial aid lent a woman who soon afterward circled Europe, brought no
+reimbursement. Her handsomely engraved card, with the "Russell Square
+Hotel, London," as address, reached me instead of the interest money
+which perhaps paid the engraver.
+
+Money lent a young man to start a small business, was used for his
+wedding expenses, and an interval of five years brings no word from him.
+Poor and despicable beings indeed, become the victims of the borrowing
+habit. It is the shattered faith in humanity, and the heart hurts that I
+regret, rather than the loss of what can be replaced. I tell you these
+incidents that you may realize how I have come to regard money-lending,
+as a species of unkindness to a friend or relative.
+
+It is only one step removed from giving a sick or overtaxed man or woman
+a morphine powder.
+
+Sleep and rest ensue, but ten to one the habit is formed for life.
+
+The happy experiences of my life in money-lending, have been two
+instances where I offered loans which were not asked, and which proved
+to be bridges over the chasm of temporary misfortune, to the success
+awaiting a worthy woman and man. The really deserving rarely ask for
+loans.
+
+I can imagine with what pleasure you would take a cheque from this
+letter, for the amount which would carry you through college.
+
+Yet when you had finished your course, you would find so many things you
+wanted to do, and must do, the debt would become too heavy to lift, save
+by borrowing from some one else.
+
+If not that, then you would impose upon the fact of our relationship,
+and on your belief that I had plenty of means without the amount you
+owed me: and so you would join the great army of good-for-nothings in
+the world.
+
+There is one thing you must always remember:
+
+No matter how close the blood tie between two beings, even twins, each
+soul comes into the world alone, and with a separate life destiny to
+work out.
+
+If I have worked out my destiny to financial independence, that does
+not entitle you to a share of it. If it seems best for me to aid you, it
+is not because a blood tie makes it a duty. I grow to believe there is a
+sort of curse on money which is not earned, even when it is bestowed by
+father, on son or daughter.
+
+It cripples individual development. Only when money is earned is it
+blest.
+
+Regarding your future profession, I cannot agree with your idea that
+because you feel no particular love for any one calling, and have a
+halfway tendency toward several, that you will never be a success. Great
+geniuses are often consumed with a passion for some one line of study or
+employment, but there have been many great men who did not know what
+they were fitted to do until accident or necessity gave them an
+opportunity.
+
+Success means simply concentration and perseverance.
+
+Whether you decide to be a mechanic, a lawyer, a doctor, or a merchant,
+the one thing to do is to fix all your mental powers upon the goal you
+select, and then call all the forces from within and from without, to
+aid you to reach it.
+
+It would, of course, be folly for you to select a profession which
+requires special talent. No matter how you might concentrate and apply
+yourself, you could never be a great poet, a great artist, or a great
+musician.
+
+You have not the creative genius.
+
+But law, medicine, mechanics, or mercantile matters, with your good
+brain and fair education, you could conquer.
+
+You say you vacillate from one to another, like the wind which goes to
+the four points of the compass in twenty-four hours.
+
+But you are very young, and this should not discourage you.
+
+It would be well to think the four vocations over quietly, when alone,
+and sit down by yourself early in the morning asking for guidance. Then,
+when you feel you have made a decision, let nothing turn you from it.
+
+Direct all your studies and thoughts to further that decision.
+
+Think of yourself as achieving the very highest success in your chosen
+field, and work for that end.
+
+You cannot fail.
+
+If you desire light from without upon the best path to pursue, I would
+advise you to find a good phrenologist, and have a careful reading made
+of your head. Its formation and the development of its organs would
+indicate in what direction lay your greatest strength, and where you
+needed to be especially watchful.
+
+But remember if your phrenologist tells you that you have a weak will,
+it does not mean that you must necessarily _always_ have a weak will. It
+means that you are to strengthen it, by concentration. There is a great
+truth underlying phrenology, palmistry, and astrology; but it is
+ridiculous to accept their verdicts as final and unchangeable, and it is
+unwise to ignore the good they may do, rightly applied and understood.
+
+I recall the fact that you were born in early June. I know enough about
+the influence of the planets upon a child born at that period to assert
+that you are particularly inclined to a Gemini nature--the twin nature,
+which wants to do two things at one time. You want to stay in and go
+out, to read a book and play tennis, to swim and sit on the sand. Later
+in life, you will want to remain single and marry, and travel and remain
+at home, unless you begin _now_ to select one course of the two which
+are for ever presenting themselves to you, in small and large matters.
+
+Whenever you feel yourself vacillating between two impulses, take
+yourself at once in hand, decide upon the preferable course, and go
+ahead. Dominate your astrological tendencies, do not be dominated by
+them. Dominate your weaknesses as exhibited by your phrenological chart,
+and build up the brain cells which need strengthening, and lessen the
+power of the undesirable qualities by giving them no food or indulgence.
+
+It is a great thing to understand yourself as you are, and then to go
+ahead and make yourself what you desire to be.
+
+When a carpenter starts to build a house, he knows just what tools and
+what materials to work with are his. If there is a broken implement, he
+replaces it with another, and if he is short of material he supplies it.
+But young men set forth to make futures and fortunes, with no knowledge
+of their own equipment.
+
+They do not know their own strongest or weakest traits, and are
+unprepared for the temptations and obstacles that await them.
+
+I would advise you to call in the aid of all the occult sciences, to
+help you in forming an estimate of your own higher and lower tendencies,
+and in deciding for what line of occupation you were best fitted. Then,
+after you have compared the statistics so gathered with your own idea of
+yourself, you should proceed to make your character what you wish it to
+be.
+
+This work will be ten thousand times more profitable to you than a mere
+routine of college studies, gained by running in debt.
+
+To know yourself is far better knowledge than to know Virgil. And to
+make yourself is a million times better than to have any one else make
+you.
+
+
+
+
+To Miss Elsie Dean
+
+_Regarding the Habit of Exaggeration_
+
+
+During your visit here with my niece, I became much interested in you.
+
+Zoe had often written me of her affection for you, and I can readily
+understand her feeling, now that I have your personal acquaintance.
+
+You have no mother, and your father, you say, absorbed in business, like
+so many American fathers, seems almost a stranger. Even the most devoted
+fathers, rarely understand their daughters.
+
+Now, I want to take the part of a mother and write you to-day, as I
+would write my own daughter, had one been bestowed upon me with the many
+other blessings which are mine.
+
+I could not ask for a fairer, more amiable, or brighter daughter than
+you, nor one possessed of a kinder or more unselfish nature.
+
+You are lovable, entertaining, industrious, and refined.
+
+But you possess one fault which needs eradicating, or at least a
+propensity which needs directing.
+
+_It is the habit of exaggeration in conversation_.
+
+I noticed that small happenings, amusing or exciting, became events of
+colossal importance when related by you.
+
+I noticed that brief remarks were amplified and grew into something like
+orations when you repeated them.
+
+I confess that you made small incidents more interesting, and
+insignificant words acquired poetic meaning under your tongue.
+
+And I confess also that you never once wronged or injured any one by
+your exaggerations--save yourself.
+
+Zoe often said to me, "Isn't it wonderful how Elsie's imagination lends
+a halo to the commonest event," and all your friends know that you have
+this habit of hyperbole in conversation.
+
+Now, in your early girlhood, it is lightly regarded as "Elsie's way."
+Later, in your maturity, I fear it will be called a harsher name.
+
+When you come to the time of life that larger subjects than girlish
+pranks and badinage engage your mind, it will be necessary for you to be
+more exact in your descriptions of occurrences and conversations.
+Besides this, there is the heritage of your unborn children to consider.
+I once knew a little girl who possessed the same vivid imagination, and
+allowed it to continue unchecked through life. She married, and her son,
+to-day, is utterly devoid of fine moral senses. He is a mental
+monstrosity--incapable of telling the truth. His falsehoods are many and
+varied, and his name is a synonym of untruth. He relates, as truth, the
+most marvellous exploits in which he really never took part, and
+describes scenes and places he has never visited, save through the
+pages of some novel.
+
+His lack of moral sense has blighted his mother's life, and she is
+wholly unconscious that he is only an exaggerated edition of herself.
+
+I think, as a rule, such imaginations as you possess belong to the
+literary mind. I would advise you to turn your attention to
+story-writing, and in that occupation you will find vent for your
+romantic tendencies.
+
+Meanwhile watch yourself and control your speech.
+
+Learn to be exact.
+
+Tell the truth in small matters, and do not allow yourself to indulge in
+seemingly harmless white lies of exaggeration.
+
+There are times when we should refrain from speaking all the truth, but
+we should refrain by silence or an adroit change of subject. We should
+not feel called upon to relate all the unpleasant truths we know of
+people.
+
+When asked what we know of some acquaintance, we are justified in
+telling the worthy and commendable traits, and saying nothing of the
+faults.
+
+Therefore, while to suppress a portion of the truth is at times wise and
+kind, to distort it, or misstate facts, is never needed and never
+excusable.
+
+When you and Zoe came from your drive one day you were full of
+excitement over an adventure with a Greek road merchant.
+
+As you told the story, the handsome peddler had accosted you at the exit
+of the post-office and asked you to look at his wares.
+
+When you declined he became familiar, paid a compliment to Zoe's beauty,
+and assured her that a certain lace shawl in his possession would be
+irresistible draped about her face.
+
+Then he had pursued the carriage on his wheel and continued to "make
+eyes" and pay compliments to the very gate of my home, where he
+abandoned the chase.
+
+The facts were, according to further investigation, that the man paid a
+simple trade compliment in reference to the shawl and its becomingness
+to a pretty face, mounted his wheel and rode away, as it happened, in
+the same direction you and Zoe were taking.
+
+Again, you related a bit of repartee between Zoe and a caller, which I
+had chanced to over-hear, and out of two short sentences you made a
+small brochure, most amusing, but most untrue.
+
+It was complimentary to both Zoe and her caller, yet it was not the
+conversation which took place, and therefore was not truthful.
+
+These are trifling incidents, yet they are the straws, telling that the
+wind blows from the marsh-lands of inexactness--not from the mountain
+tops of truth.
+
+Once a woman loses a sense of the great value of absolute truthfulness,
+she has blurred the clear mirror of her soul.
+
+Put yourself upon a diet of _facts_, my sweet young friend, and cure
+this propensity, harmless enough now, but dangerous for your future.
+
+Watch your tongue that it does not say _five or six_ when it should say
+_two_, or _yards_ when it should say _inches_.
+
+Even in the smallest matters, practise the habit of being exact.
+
+You will thank me for this advice sometime, even if it seems
+unreasonable to you to-day, and remember, I would not take the liberty
+or the trouble to so advise you, did I not love you and feel anxious for
+your welfare.
+
+
+
+
+To Sybyl Marchmont
+
+_Who Has Learned Her Origin_
+
+
+Your despairing letter lies before me. I wish you were here, my dear
+child, that I might talk from my heart, instead of writing from it. I am
+sorry that the secret, so long hidden, has been revealed to you, and in
+such a despicable manner.
+
+An anonymous letter always carries with it the venom of a serpent. I
+have long known your history, though the world generally believed you to
+be the actual daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Marchmont, who adopted you when
+you were scarcely one week old.
+
+No daughter ever received more affection or better care than these good
+people gave you. Mrs. Marchmont lived always with a fear in her heart
+that you might learn your history from some idle or malicious lip, and
+before she died begged me to be your comforting friend, if that hour
+ever came, which has now arrived.
+
+As your mother's nearest friend, it is natural you should turn to me in
+your crucial hour of pain. And in reply to your questions regarding the
+truth of this anonymous assertion, I will tell you all I know.
+
+Your own mother was well born, and a girl of great beauty and charm. She
+was of foreign blood, and her parents, after the foreign custom,
+selected for her, at the age of seventeen, a man of mature years and
+unattractive personality, but some fortune. The family lived in a
+seaport town, and your mother attracted the eye of a young seafaring
+man, holding a government position. An intense and uncontrollable love
+sprang up between them. Your mother had been kept in ignorance of God's
+great law of sex attraction, its purpose and its results, and she was
+like a new-born babe towed on the sea of her own suddenly awakened
+emotion.
+
+It was arranged that your mother was to elope with her lover on his next
+arrival in port. All plans were to be made by him during the voyage on
+which he went forth, after a stolen interview with your mother. He was
+lost at sea, and all on board the ship perished with him. Mr. and Mrs.
+Marchmont chanced to be sojourning in the place at the time of your
+birth. Mr. Marchmont had longed for a child, and the tragic story came
+to his ears through the physician of your mother's family, and he and
+his wife decided to adopt you and take you to America.
+
+I was the one friend who shared with Mrs. Marchmont the story of your
+birth. Other friends knew she had adopted a child, and of course all
+sorts of rumours were afloat for a time. Mr. Marchmont's nephew was
+particularly unfriendly, I remember, as he had believed himself heir to
+his uncle's estate until your adoption.
+
+Some three years ago I chanced to be in the seaport town where you were
+born, and I made quiet inquiries about your mother. I learned that she
+had recently died, leaving a husband and three children. I hunted up the
+children, and found them to be most uninteresting and ordinary. The
+oldest daughter I met and studied. She was plain and commonplace in
+appearance, and the other children were dull and unattractive.
+
+The husband was the elderly man selected by your grandparents. Just how
+he had been led to accept the second place in your mother's life, and
+whether he had known of the tragedy, I could not learn without asking
+more questions than I deemed wise.
+
+But what I want to impress upon your mind by this recital is, _your own
+divine inheritance of love,_ the inheritance which has bestowed upon you
+physical beauty, mental power, and rare qualities of heart and soul. I
+know few women so endowed by the Creator as you. I know of few young
+girls--in fact, not one--I would so gladly and proudly claim as a
+daughter, or wish a daughter to be like, as your lovely self.
+
+When I read your letter, with its wild expressions of self-abasement and
+despair and regret that you were in the world, where, you seemed to
+believe, you had no right to be, I could not help picturing to myself
+the dull face and disagreeable personality of your half-sister, the
+child whom you no doubt believe has a greater right than yourself on
+earth. Now whatever society has decided is legal and right for human
+beings, you must not forget that God also has made rules, and that those
+rules must first be obeyed, before the rules of man can be regarded as
+perfect.
+
+God's first law, regarding the propagation of the human species, is that
+the _mother must be dominated by a supreme and ruling emotion to give to
+the world the highest type of a child_.
+
+Your mother loved your father with all her heart and soul. She was a
+young girl, ignorant of the world. She thought of her lover as her
+rightful mate, and lived but for the hour when he should rescue her
+from the unhappy fate arranged by unwise and sordid-minded parents.
+
+Your father loved her, and they were in God's sight more truly husband
+and wife than the soulless and loveless ceremony of the law made her and
+her legal husband afterward.
+
+It is a great misfortune that your parents lacked the self-control which
+is necessary to every well-balanced human being who seeks for the
+fullest development. It is a sad thing that over your life this shadow
+of unlegalized birth must rest.
+
+But were I given the choice to-day to be what you are, or what your
+sister is, and what thousands of children born of loveless marriages
+are, I would not for one second hesitate in my choice.
+
+The world needs marriage laws to keep any order in society.
+
+The wisely reared and well-balanced woman will keep herself in womanly
+reserve for her legal husband.
+
+Your mother, by a moment's weakness and loss of self-control, left a
+blight upon her life for ever, and a shadow upon yours.
+
+But do not for one instant think of yourself as anything but _a child of
+God_, endowed with all the wealth of the spiritual kingdom, whatever the
+law may withhold from you here.
+
+You are legitimized by love, your sister is legitimate by law. She is
+illegitimate in the sight of heaven, you in sight of earth.
+
+Be glad of your beautiful nature and beautiful qualities, and do not
+spoil them by despondency or pessimism.
+
+Think of yourself as if you were a child of Adam and Eve, born before
+the serpent appeared, when there was no law but the law of love to
+govern two souls, drawn together by irresistible attraction.
+
+The best and highest qualities of two human beings meet and mingle in
+your nature. Do you suppose the great Creator of all things regards you
+as base born, when he has so endowed you with all that makes woman
+lovable and charming.
+
+Live up to your divine inheritance, my dear girl. Make the world better
+for your presence in it, and bear your sorrow with that resignation and
+philosophy which all human beings must cultivate if they do not wish to
+become weak repiners when they face the sorrows of life.
+
+Look the world squarely in the eyes, and feel no shame.
+
+Your mother's marriage to the man she detested, and the birth of
+children conceived in loathing, were acts which in my mind called for
+more shame on her part than your own birth. Both were misfortunes for
+her, since only by living an orderly, controlled, and lawful life can
+any human being find happiness or self-respect in the world.
+
+But when we come to the close analysis of motives and impulses, many an
+act the world condemns is far less reprehensible than other acts which
+meet its loud acclaim.
+
+You have received from the vast spiritual realms about us your rarely
+beautiful qualities. Go forth and give them to humanity.
+
+Be strong, be good, be brave, be happy.
+
+No one and nothing can harm you but your own mind.
+
+The world, as we encounter it, is but an echo of our own strong
+convictions. Respect yourself absolutely, believe in yourself
+absolutely, and the world will respect you and believe in you.
+
+Say to yourself every hour, "I am God's divine creature," and no one
+will dare look you in the eyes and say you are anything less than that.
+
+The arms of infinite love enfold you--have no fear.
+
+
+
+
+To Miss Diana Rivers
+
+_Young Lady Contemplating a Career as a Journalist_
+
+
+Your interesting letter regarding your future plans has been food for my
+thoughts ever since its receipt this morning.
+
+I remember when you were my guest a year ago that you told me you felt
+like a big bird in a small cage. Every time you tried to spread your
+wings you were bruised by bars. Your home environment with its few
+duties and small responsibilities, your church and your charities,
+failed to give you full opportunity for the exercise of all your vital
+forces.
+
+I knew then that you were longing for a career, and I felt confident
+that some word would come from you before long, announcing a change in
+your life.
+
+I was prepared to hear one of two things--that you were soon to be
+married, or that you had decided to enter the dramatic profession. When
+a young and attractive woman grows restless and eager for change, she
+is, unconsciously to herself, sending out a challenge to Fate to create
+new conditions in her life. Despite the fact that no male member in the
+"Fate" family has ever attained prominence in the eyes of the world, and
+that the three sisters have claimed so much power over the destinies of
+the human family, a little investigation will prove that they never make
+any pronounced move without calling in the aid of Cupid.
+
+Cupid is their prime minister, and we all know that prime ministers are
+the power behind the throne of rulers.
+
+When you sent out your eager thoughts for "something to happen," to
+change the monotony of your existence, I knew the Fate sisters were
+quite likely telegraphing Cupid that his assistance was needed to quiet
+a small riot in the human family.
+
+Once they set Cupid busy with a human heart, the Fates need give it no
+further attention. When Cupid reports that his work with the heart is
+finished, then the Angel of Resignation or the Angel of Death must
+finish the task.
+
+Knowing you to be particularly fond of the theatre as a distraction, I
+had thought you might essay the role of society actress, confounding
+appreciation for talent, as so many women do; and when your letter
+opened with the announcement that you were about to give me a great
+surprise, I was prepared to hear that you were billed to appear in a
+walking role, with a road company, next season, with promises of greater
+things "soon afterward."
+
+But I confess to absolute surprise, as I read on, and learned that your
+career was to lead you, not through Lovers' Lane, not before the
+footlights, but along the hurly-burly byways and highways of American
+newspaper work, beginning with interviews and reporting. Allow me to
+quote from your letter before me.
+
+"I do not imagine I have talent save the talent for work. I am, as you
+know, well educated, as that expression goes to-day. I have always found
+expression with the pen an easy mode of communicating my impressions and
+ideas.
+
+"I am observing, and I have a keen sense of humour, and I have (so
+people tell me) an agreeable personality. I know the value of correct
+dressing, and I am not oversensitive. That is, I am not one who will go
+down at the first rebuff. I have the real American spirit, which makes
+me believe myself as good as anybody, and you know my family name is one
+to buoy up that impression. Therefore, it seems to me I cannot fail to
+attain some degree of success. I am sure to obtain entree to people and
+functions, and I can describe what I see and hear in attractive form. I
+shall shrink at no task, however difficult, and stop at no obstacle.
+
+"I am determined to make a success as a reporter and a correspondent,
+and after I have achieved something in that line I may look to an
+editorial position; and who knows but my fertile imagination, coupled
+with the experiences sure to come to me, may develop the great American
+novelist the world is waiting?"
+
+This is all interesting and admirable reasoning.
+
+But, having seen much of the world, and known much of the various types
+of young women writers and reporters and correspondents, I feel like
+discussing the subject of your profession with you. At the instigation,
+perhaps, of some editor who makes the mistake of thinking success must
+be reached through sensationalism, you may be tempted to make your pen,
+not _mightier_, but more _cruel_ than the sword.
+
+I remember once upon a time meeting a young woman who had come, unbidden
+by the hostess, to "write up" a social function where a number of
+celebrated people were congregated.
+
+Her employer had sent her to the house, telling her to obtain an entree
+by fair means or foul; and as she was well dressed and quiet in manner,
+she was not repulsed by an amiable hostess. This lady realized that the
+reporter has his or her living to make, and must be either helped or
+hindered by the willingness or unwillingness of people to furnish
+material for copy. Being informed that the young woman was "literary,"
+and chancing to stand near her for a few moments, I asked her the nature
+of her work.
+
+The young woman looked a trifle embarrassed, as she answered: "Well, to
+tell you the truth, I write a good many disagreeable and nasty things
+about people, especially people in public life. The editors who take my
+work will have that kind. I have essayed better things, and they would
+not touch them. So I am compelled to write the stuff they do want. I
+must make a living." When I read the "stuff" in question, I was inclined
+to doubt the assertion of the writer that "she must make a living." The
+world would be the better should she and all her kind cease to exist.
+Ridicule, falsehood, and insinuation were the leading traits of the
+young woman's literary style. Costumes and personalities were
+caricatured, and conversations and actions misstated. The entire article
+would have been libelous, had it not been too cowardly to deserve so
+bold a word.
+
+It is useless for any man or woman to assert that such reportorial work
+is done from necessity. The blackmailer and the pickpocket have as much
+right to the plea, as the newspaper masked-assassin, with the concealed
+weapon of a pen.
+
+If you are ever asked by any editor to do this reportorial stiletto
+work, let me urge you to take to professional burglary, rather than
+consent to write what such an employer demands.
+
+It is far less despicable to rob houses of things of mercantile value,
+than to rob characters and reputations and personalities. Again, when
+you are sent out upon a commission to obtain an interview with any
+person, obtain what you seek and take nothing else away with you.
+
+Just as you would scorn to pawn the watch of the famous actress which
+you may find lying on the table as you pass out, so scorn to sell any
+personal speech she may have carelessly dropped in your hearing which
+you know was not intended for publication. Petty larceny is not a noble
+feature of interviewing. Even though a facility for selling such
+dishonestly gained property to advantage be yours, do not convince
+yourself or be convinced that larceny should be included in your
+reportorial duties.
+
+I recollect speaking with you once upon the difficulties young women
+encountered who attempted to win honours in a dramatic career. You felt
+that the necessity to cater to the ideas and wishes of inferior minds,
+in representing a character on the stage, would be one of the hardest
+phases of stage life to meet.
+
+"To be loud and spectacular where I wanted to be refined and subtle,"
+you said, "just to catch some rough audience and fill the house, would
+be insupportable. And yet I know actresses ofttimes must do that very
+thing, to keep a foothold in the profession."
+
+I am wondering how you will meet what seems to me a more humiliating
+role, when you are sent out by an editor to gain an entree to some
+person who does not wish to be interviewed.
+
+Will you, when refused entrance at the front door, go in at the rear and
+hobnob with the servants? will you spy, and watch and wait on street
+corners, and hide yourself in hallways, and intercept and surprise, and
+congratulate yourself when you have trapped your prey? That is the
+shameful pathway which nowadays leads to what is called "successful
+newspaper work."
+
+You need to realize the facts before you enter the profession. Were you
+my daughter, I am certain I should feel much less concern were you to
+enter the theatrical field.
+
+And yet if you choose to stand by your ideals, and retain your
+self-respect, you can do so, and succeed in journalism.
+
+If you have, as you say, observation, expression, humour, and ambition,
+you can create a style of your own: which will not necessitate the loss
+of all womanly sense of decency and pride in dealing with your fellow
+beings. It might be well for you to cultivate and add to the list of
+your qualities appreciation of all that is best in human nature and
+worthiest of respect. If you understand the law of concentration and
+demand, you can obtain an entrance to the people you wish to see,
+through the front hall and a properly engraved card.
+
+If that fails, a polite and frank note, stating your purpose and
+intimating your self-respecting ideas of your profession, may prove
+effective. Once establish your reputation as an interviewer who is not a
+highwayman in disguise, and you will achieve tenfold the success your
+less reputable confreres gain in the long run. Try and remember always
+that fame, glory, or even crime, do not destroy all human sensibilities,
+or render the possessor invulnerable to the thrust of a pen.
+
+The greatest warrior who ever conquered armies has still the power to
+feel hurt when he sees some personal blemish or misfortune described in
+print.
+
+You would never be guilty of saying to any man's face, "How hideous
+your harelip renders you"--and why should you go from his presence and
+make such a statement to the whole world concerning him? One of the most
+gifted men America ever claimed was driven from his native land by the
+cruel, bald, and heartless personalities of newspaper critics, who
+seemed to consider it necessary to comment on his physical infirmities
+whenever his genius was mentioned.
+
+During the lifetime of one of England's great literary women, an
+American correspondent who had been given an interview in her home
+described her as possessing the "face of a horse." Surely this was
+agreeable reading for a gifted woman whose genius had delighted
+thousands!
+
+It has sometimes seemed to me that theatrical road life with a
+one-night-stand company would be less brutalizing to the finer
+sensibilities, and less lowering to the ideals of a young girl, than the
+method of work required of many newspaper reporters in America to-day.
+The editor who scores the actress for lax morals seems often to ignore
+the fact that there is a mental as well as a physical prostitution.
+
+Look to it that you do not trail your banner of noble womanhood in the
+dust, at the demand of any editor or syndicate. Keep your purity of pen,
+as well as your chastity of body, and believe no man who tells you that
+you will get on better in the world by selling either. There is room
+higher up.
+
+
+
+
+To Nanette
+
+_A Former Maid_
+
+
+Curiously enough, my dear little Nanette, I was thinking about you, and
+wishing to know something of you, the very day your letter came.
+
+Of many who have been helpers in my employ, you were one of the few who
+seemed to care more for me than for the wages I paid.
+
+There was between us that ideal condition which I wish might exist
+between all employers and employees. You wanted the work you were fitted
+to do, and I wanted such work done. You were glad of the money it
+brought you, and I was glad to recompense you. You wanted appreciation
+and sympathy and consideration aside from your earnings, and I wanted a
+personal interest in my affairs, and a friendly wish to please me,
+aside from the mere work well done. You never seemed to me less womanly
+or less refined because you were a wage-earner, and I did not represent
+to you oppression or monopoly merely because I paid the money and you
+received it. I took you into my confidence in many ways, and you made me
+feel I was your friend as well as your employer. We enjoyed cosy chats,
+and yet you no more desired or wished to be present at my social
+functions than you desired me to enter into all your merrymakings and
+pleasures. You were, in fact, one of the most agreeable and sensible
+women I have ever known in any station in life. And now you write me
+that you are engaged to be married, and ask me to give you counsel in a
+very serious matter.
+
+Together with your other excellent qualities, you have possessed economy
+and prudence.
+
+At the age of twenty-five you have a tidy bank-account, the savings of
+eleven years. This money is increasing, year by year, and drawing a
+small interest.
+
+Now comes your lover, a hard-working and sober young man, so you say,
+but earning only a small salary as a clerk.
+
+He has met with some reverses, and is temporarily embarrassed. He wants
+you to lend him a few hundred dollars, and he will pay you the same
+interest you are now receiving, but you fear it would be unwomanly on
+your part to take this interest money. At the same time you feel a
+reluctance to break in upon your savings, which you had planned to use
+in helping establish a home. You want to befriend your lover, and you
+want to be wise and careful, and so you write to me, your old-time
+adviser, for counsel. I fear I may hurt your feelings in what I am about
+to say.
+
+I have seen much of the world, and have studied humanity in many phases
+and in many classes.
+
+There is one type of man I have never yet known to be strong, reliable,
+and trustworthy,--a man for a woman to lean upon in times of trouble and
+sorrow,--a man I would like to see any friend take for a life
+companion,--_and that is the young man who asks a loan of money from a
+woman he loves, or one who loves him_. Believe me, there is some lack of
+real moral fibre in such a man.
+
+A husband and wife many years married, and united by common interests,
+may become so one in purpose and thought that a common purse would be as
+natural to them as a common dinner-table.
+
+With mutual interests, planning for their future and the future of their
+children, there could be no talk of "My money" and "Your money" between
+them.
+
+But before marriage, or immediately after, the man who begins to ask a
+woman for the use of her purse, should be distrusted by her. He could
+not broach such a subject unless he lacked a certain refined strength
+which makes a manly man a woman's protector by nature. Even where no
+sentiment exists between a man and a woman, the really strong men of the
+world never become borrowers from women. If through friendly interest
+and affection some woman compelled such a man to take a loan, he would
+know no rest or peace of mind until he had liquidated the debt.
+
+When a man is a woman's lover, and asks her to advance money to him for
+any reason, she may as well realize at once the reed on which she will
+lean if she accepts him for a life companion. To deceive herself for a
+moment with the idea that he will be a staff of strength, is but to
+delay disillusion. A vital quality is left out of his character.
+
+He is but one step removed from the man who _seeks_ a woman because she
+has money. And he is the most despicable of the human race.
+
+I have known three women of different social positions to lend money to
+their lovers.
+
+One man invested it and lost it, and never made an effort to reimburse
+the lady, who broke her engagement in consequence, after two unhappy
+years. Another went away owing the money, and was never again heard
+from. The third married the unwise woman who had loaned him her
+competence, and continued to look to her for support.
+
+Therefore, my dear Nanette, I would urge you to think twice, and yet a
+third time, before you lend your fiance your savings.
+
+Tell him frankly that you will feel more respect for him if he is
+willing to sacrifice comfort and save from his own income enough to lift
+the debt he has incurred, and that you are sure he will feel less
+humiliated as time goes by if he is not financially in debt to you. If
+he were to fall ill tell him it would be your first impulse to devote
+your money to his care; but while he is able-bodied and well, you do not
+like to have him lean on you for aid.
+
+You can judge something of the man's character by the way he receives
+this statement from you.
+
+And whatever may result, even if it is the end of your engagement, do
+not grieve your heart away over it. Better far to have the end come now
+than to marry a dependent and shiftless man, who will humiliate your
+pride by a thousand and one mean traits. The moment a young wife becomes
+the financial head of a household, and the man depends upon her to keep
+the family free from debt, sentiment and romance fly from the windows of
+the heart, and poor Cupid goes away with his head under his wing. This
+situation might befall people long married, as I said before, without
+causing disaster, because the wife would have years of other experiences
+stored up in memory, to maintain her respect for her husband.
+
+The natural instinct of a manly man is to be the protector and the
+breadwinner. He loves to shield and support the woman of his choice. If
+she has any talent or profession which gives her satisfaction to pursue,
+and which yields her an income, he will, if broad-minded and
+sympathetic, place no obstacle in her path so long as this vocation is
+no barrier to their domestic happiness. But he is sensitive to her
+assuming any of the financial burdens of life.
+
+If circumstances render it necessary for her to do so, he suffers
+keenly, and the utmost delicacy and consideration on her part alone can
+save him from utter humiliation.
+
+This is the attitude of the manly man, my dear Nanette, the man who
+makes the good husband and father.
+
+The unselfish, broad-minded and considerate wife will lead a husband to
+think of her right to aid in the establishment and maintenance of a home
+when she is able to do her part. But the man who makes a good husband
+never suggests it as her duty, or asks her to advance money.
+
+It is commendable in you to wish to aid in making a home. It is unmanly
+in your lover to ask you to help him pay his debts. Beware of the lover
+who asks for or accepts a loan.
+
+
+
+
+To The Rev. Wilton Marsh
+
+_Regarding His Son and Daughter_
+
+
+My dear Cousin Wilton:--You have no idea how your letter took me back to
+my merry girlhood, when you and I resided in the same neighbourhood, and
+I was the concern of your precociously serious mind. Yes, indeed, I do
+realize what a mistake you made in living the repressed life you did all
+those early boyhood years. What a pity your parents reared one of your
+sensitive and imaginative nature in the gloomy old doctrines of a
+depressing religion, which so misrepresented the God of love: and how
+odd that your father and mine should have been born of the same parents,
+educated in the same schools, and yet be no more alike in beliefs or
+methods of life than two people of a different race and era.
+
+And again it is not strange, when we realize that hundreds of
+generations lie back of both parents, and innumerable ancestors of both
+father and mother contribute their different mentalities to the children
+in a family. Back of that is the great philosophy of reincarnation--the
+truth of which impresses me more and more each year I live.
+
+Do you recall your horror the first time I told you I had read a book on
+reincarnation, and confessed that it had made me anxious to study the
+theory?
+
+You said I was a pagan and a heathen, and that I would surely be damned
+forever unless I turned to the way of salvation.
+
+And do you recall your misery when I seized you one evening at your
+birthday party (you were twenty), and dragged you about the room in a
+waltz? That is, I waltzed, while you hobbled about like a lame calf,
+much to the amusement of most of the company.
+
+There were more who sympathized with my views of life than with yours.
+You were such a wet blanket on our youthful spirits. Your ever-blazing
+lake of brimstone did not even serve to warm the blanket.
+
+I have been gratified to watch your growth the last ten years.
+
+You have so changed your point of view, which indicates your real worth
+and progressive good sense. And when you tell me that you have for years
+regretted your lost opportunities for natural and moral pleasure, and
+that you suffered beyond your power to describe in those old days in
+conquering your desire to dance and play games, it brings the tears of
+mingled rage and pity to my eyes. Rage at the old theology, and pity for
+the poor children whose lives were shadowed by it.
+
+And now what you tell me of your son and daughter proves another of my
+theories true, and shows me how nature revenges its wrongs.
+
+Children, my dear Wilton, especially the offspring of strong characters,
+_inherit the suppressed tendencies of their parents_. They bring into
+action the unexhausted impulses and the ungratified desires of those
+parents.
+
+The greatest singers are almost invariably the offspring of mothers or
+fathers who _were music hungry_, and who were given no complete
+gratification of this craving.
+
+The poet, you will find, is the voice of an artistic-natured parent, who
+was forced to be emotionally dumb.
+
+And the proverbial clergyman's son is merely the natural result of the
+same cause. He is charged with the tendencies and impulses which his
+father crucified.
+
+That your son loathes study, and hates church-going, and adores a brass
+band and a circus, and runs away to the races, does not in the least
+surprise me. Nor that your sixteen-year-old daughter grows hysterical at
+the sound of dance music, and prefers a theatrical show in your village
+hall to a Sunday-school picnic, and is mad to become an actress.
+
+_They are your own wronged and starved emotions personified, and crying
+out to you for justice._
+
+The very best thing for you to do with the boy is to put him into a
+gymnasium and a football team as soon as possible. Offer no opposition
+when he wants to see a good horse-race. Urge him to go, and ask him to
+tell you all about it when he returns. Begin right now to get close to
+the heart of your children.
+
+Once you do that, once you convince them you are near enough to their
+lives to understand their needs and to try and gratify their natural
+longings, all your worries will take wing and fly away; for your
+children will cease to hide and cloak their actions and natures, and
+they will no longer wish to deceive or attempt to defy you.
+
+Send your daughter where she can learn dancing, in company with other
+refined and well-bred young people. You have so far emancipated yourself
+from your old superstitions and beliefs that this action on your part
+will not antagonize the desirable members of your congregation.
+
+Only a remnant of the old bigots and intolerants are to be found in any
+congregation of intelligent people of to-day.
+
+If that remnant is shaken out of its winding-sheet by being antagonized,
+you may galvanize it into life.
+
+At all events, do not endanger the peace of your home and the happiness
+of your children, for fear of antagonizing a few parishioners of
+arrested spiritual development.
+
+Give your son and daughter an outlet for the youthful vitality which is
+like steam: a moving power when used, dangerous and destructive when
+pent up.
+
+Take young Wilton and Rebecca into a room, and talk the whole matter
+over.
+
+Tell them how deeply you love them, and how you have just come to
+realize the mistake you have made in trying to eradicate from them the
+natural desire for wholesome pleasure instead of giving it proper
+avenues of expression.
+
+Say frankly that you see your error, and that you intend to rectify it.
+
+Ask their cooeperation, and appeal to their good taste and affection not
+to mortify or humiliate you in your position of clergyman, by
+overstepping the bounds of decorum or discretion.
+
+Lead them to talk of their ambitions and desires, and, as consistently
+as you can, gratify them.
+
+Let your daughter come to me for a season. I will help to reshape and
+modify her ideals of enjoyment to some degree.
+
+I am sure if she sees a few of our best spectacular plays, and hears
+good music, and enjoys beautiful rhythmic dancing, she will not be so
+carried away with the travelling show.
+
+I will acquaint her with some of the commonplace facts concerning the
+lives of theatrical people, and show her the frayed tinsel and worn
+faces by daylight. This will do more for her than all your sermons on
+the dangers of a theatrical career.
+
+The young heart is fascinated with the thought of danger and temptation.
+
+It is repelled by the commonplace and the ugly.
+
+When you talk to a young mind in a whisper and behind locked doors about
+a temptation to be avoided, you but give edge to appetite and curiosity.
+
+When you bring the temptation out into the glare of sunlight, and speak
+of it in presence of the whole world, you dispel the illusion.
+
+I will gather together some data concerning the sporting men of America,
+and send your son. I will also mail him the sporting papers regularly.
+Let him talk and read openly about the subject, and it will lose half
+its weird charm.
+
+He, too, should learn to dance, swim, fence, and ride. His bounding
+vitality needs directing in wholesome channels. I have never understood
+the prejudice against dancing.
+
+To me, it is a form of religious praise of the Creator of youth, health,
+vitality, and grace. I have always loved dancing, and the exercise,
+besides being eminently beneficial to the health and wonderfully
+conducive to grace is, to my thinking, highly moral in its effect. Its
+only danger lies in wrong associations, and these seem to threaten young
+people who are restricted from the enjoyment in their homes and among
+their rightful companions.
+
+I cannot help thinking that Loie Fuller should have a niche in the hall
+of fame, among the "Immortals," for having given the last century her
+exquisitely beautiful creations in dancing.
+
+No woman has given us a great epic, or a great painting, or a great
+musical composition, but she has given us a great dance-poem, which is
+at the same time a painting and a song. Oh, you poor starved, blind
+soul, to be deprived of such beautiful spectacles. How I pity you, and
+how I pray you to give your children the privileges you have missed
+through a belittling idea of your Creator.
+
+Do you fancy God would punish beautiful young Rebecca for dancing, any
+sooner than he would blight the willow-tree for waving its graceful arms
+to the tune the wind-harps play?
+
+Come up out of the jungles of ignorance and bigotry, my dear cousin,
+and live on the hilltops and bring your children with you. For there you
+will all find yourself nearer to God and to humanity.
+
+
+
+
+To Mrs. Charles McAllister
+
+_Formerly Miss Winifred Clayborne_
+
+
+I am glad that for once you have written and asked my advice before you
+began your course of action.
+
+You wrote me after you entered Vassar and asked me what I thought of
+your doing so.
+
+You wrote me after you married Doctor McAllister, and asked me what I
+thought of that. My reply was a wedding gift and a telegram of good
+wishes. Now, after three years of married life, you write again and ask
+me to decide a question which has caused some discussion between you and
+the doctor.
+
+"He did not take my view of the matter at first," you say, "but he does
+now. Still, I feel that I would like another unprejudiced opinion
+before I take the contemplated step. You knew I left college before
+finishing my course. I was in love and the doctor urged me not to make
+him wait another year. He said I knew enough to make him happy, and so I
+consented."
+
+Then you proceed to tell me that you have never regretted this step, and
+that you have the best husband in the world. But you have decided
+musical gifts, and before meeting the doctor you intended going abroad
+to cultivate them after you finished at Vassar. This old ambition has
+taken hold of you again, and you want to join a friend, one of your
+classmates, who sails in June to study art in Europe. You desire to take
+a two or three years' course, and then you will be equipped with an
+accomplishment which could be made a profession if necessity demanded.
+
+"One never knows what the future holds," you say, "and it is the duty of
+every woman to make the most of herself." Both remarks are as true as
+they are trite. An almost graduate of Vassar should be more original in
+expressing herself.
+
+But there is another duty a woman should not forget--the duty to stand
+by her marriage vows and to make her husband a good wife. It seems the
+doctor did not eagerly approve your idea at the beginning. I am glad he
+did not. Unless a wife is in a precarious state of health or has an
+ailing child, I always suspect the honesty of a husband who cheerfully
+seconds her suggestion of a protracted absence from home.
+
+When a man shows no regret at having his wife away for an entire season,
+there is something wrong with his heart.
+
+Love does not find its home there, or he could not speed her going so
+far, and for so long a time, at the bidding of ambition or pleasure. You
+evidently have won the doctor over by argument, and made him feel that
+he is selfish to tie you down or clip the wings of your ambition. The
+American husband is so fearful of seeming a tyrant. "He realizes now,"
+you say, "that a woman has the right to develop the talents God gave
+her just as a man does, and that it is a wrong against her 'higher self'
+to crush down these ambitions. He realizes, too, that this separation
+means greater powers of usefulness for me in the future, and greater
+opportunities for pleasure. It will be a long and lonely time for both
+of us, as I shall only come home once or twice and the doctor may not be
+able to go over at all, though I hope he will. But the expense of my
+studies will of course be great, and we shall both need to economize. It
+is my intention to start a little conservatory after I return and take a
+few high-priced pupils. In that way I can reimburse our expenditure."
+
+But can you, my dear Winifred, _reimburse your mutual losses in other
+ways_? You do not seem to realize what such a separation may mean. You
+are both young and both attractive. I know now that you are beginning to
+be angry at my suggestion, but, fortunately, you cannot interrupt me,
+and you must hear what I have to say.
+
+Of course you are not a frivolous flirt, or a silly-headed creature
+with no ideals or principles. You have nothing of the adventuress in
+your composition, but you are a young woman, with personal charms and
+talents, and life will be unutterably desolate for you if you make a
+recluse of yourself. You will be surrounded by people of artistic
+temperaments and tastes, and I know, if you do not, that many of these
+people do lack ideals, and some of them lack principles and take pride
+in the fact. "Art for art's sake, life for pleasure's sake," is their
+motto. The entire situation will be full of danger for you. But far more
+danger will surround your husband. A man's temptations are always
+greater than a woman's. That is, there are _more_ temptations in his
+pathway, from the fact that he is by nature and environment less guarded
+and protected, and the penalties for folly are less severe. And of all
+men, unless it is a clergyman, a physician is most exposed to
+temptation. He is the confidant of hysterical women and the sharer of
+domestic secrets. Many a woman believes she is ill only because she
+desires the sympathy of her doctor, just as many a woman fancies herself
+disturbed with religious agitation only because she wants the society of
+her minister.
+
+Of course a doctor of any character or principle does not compromise his
+reputation or disgrace his calling readily. I hear Doctor McAllister
+spoken of as a man of high standing, and his picture shows a
+well-balanced head and an honest, manly face. But "A man's a man for a'
+that," my dear Winifred.
+
+We must accept facts as they exist all about us, and we must not demand
+of half-evolved human beings what we would expect of wholly divine
+creatures. It is an unnatural position for a man to be separated from
+the wife he loves for months and years.
+
+Unless he is sustained by intense religious beliefs, extreme sympathy or
+sorrow for her (as he might be were she compelled by some great trouble
+or duty to be absent), it is impossible for him not to grow in a measure
+forgetful of his ideals of constancy, and to drift into bachelor habits
+of distraction. Men do a thousand and one things for amusement which no
+woman could or would. Gilded and glittering halls of vice are inviting
+the inspection and patronage of men who are left at home by journeying
+and pleasure-seeking wives.
+
+I know this terrible statement to be absolutely true--_gambling-houses
+and dens of infamy speak of their "best season" when wives leave town
+for summer outings, just as a farmer speaks of his harvest season when
+crops are ripe._ I do not suppose your husband will seek the
+companionship of gamblers or depraved souls during your absence. Men as
+seemingly high and strong as he have fallen so low, but I do not believe
+he will. Yet, so long as we know such conditions exist, and so long as
+men as a class take the liberties they do when left to find distraction
+and entertainment, it seems to me little less than criminal when a young
+wife like yourself deliberately leaves her home and husband for the sake
+of any possible attainment.
+
+You have no right to marry a man and then to make his happiness and his
+comfort secondary to your ambitions.
+
+If he had neglected you, if he failed to support you, if he was not
+loyal to you, it would be different.
+
+But you say he is "the best of men," and that you never have regretted
+marrying him.
+
+Then let me beg of you to stand by him, as a wife should, and to make
+what progress in your music you can at home, and wait until your husband
+can accompany you before you go abroad to study.
+
+The highway of divorce is crowded with the student wives who have been
+"abroad to study," leaving their husbands at home to earn the money. Do
+not be one of them.
+
+There are greater things than a satisfied ambition, and a clean, happy,
+united married life is one.
+
+
+
+
+To Mrs. Charles Gordon
+
+_Concerning Maternity_
+
+
+I have tried to imagine myself in your place, as you requested, before
+answering your letter.
+
+To be the mother of two children, and to know that a third may be added
+before the fifth anniversary of your wedding, is for the most maternal
+of women a situation requiring rare patience and much philosophy.
+
+I know that your strength is depleted, that you are nervously unstrung,
+and I can understand your despondent state of mind.
+
+It seems to you that all romance and sentiment in life is being
+sacrificed to breeding the species. You feel that you have some personal
+privileges as a wife and a woman, not less than a mother.
+
+Like yourself, I do not believe woman's only mission in life to be the
+production of offspring, yet I consider motherhood the highest privilege
+accorded her who has for it the right physical and moral qualities.
+
+Only strong, sensible, and healthy women should become mothers, and it
+is a mistake for even such as they to be kept constantly in that
+occupation.
+
+You possess all the requisites, and you ought to bring fine children
+into the world, since you married the man you loved, and have been happy
+with him.
+
+But I can understand your reluctance to pass through the ordeal which
+modern motherhood in civilized races means, for a third time, in so
+short a period. But try and take another view of the situation.
+
+Benjamin Franklin was the fifteenth child of a poor tallow chandler. It
+is altogether probable that his coming seemed a misfortune to his
+mother, taxed with the care of such a brood. Think what the world would
+have missed had he not come to earth.
+
+Then think of this unborn child as something wonderful and divine, given
+to you to perfect. Believe it is to be the greatest blessing to you and
+to the whole world.
+
+Cultivate love and protection in your heart for it.
+
+Tell yourself every hour of the day that the God of love will not desert
+you or deprive you of strength and courage for your ordeal. That he will
+be ever near, and sustain and comfort you.
+
+Desire all beautiful and good qualities to be given your child, and
+resolutely turn away from the contemplation of anything that is hideous,
+or unwholesome, or depressing.
+
+Look for pleasing objects, read cheerful and uplifting books, and from
+infinite space call to you all ministering influences.
+
+Consider how short a time, when compared to the span of human life,
+expectant motherhood occupies, and realize the vastness of its
+influence upon the nature of the child, and through that nature upon all
+humanity.
+
+Once you grasp that consciousness, you will feel your closeness to the
+Creator of all things.
+
+Indeed, there is no other being on earth so nearly Godlike in power as
+the mother who realizes what her influence over her unborn child may be.
+
+The hard and painful path for you to walk is but a short one compared to
+the long roadway to eternity for your child.
+
+Perhaps some great statesman, or some great artist, or some great
+scientist or philosopher is lying under your heart, and it is in your
+power to make or mar his development. Perhaps a Joan of Arc, or a Rosa
+Bonheur, or a Martha Washington will crown you with pride.
+
+Such genius and influence for good as the world has never before known,
+from mortal sources, may be given to it through your unborn child. How
+wonderful your privilege, how vast your power!
+
+Only a few short months, and then the growing wonder of a child's
+unfolding mind, to beautify your days.
+
+Think of it in this way, dear little tired and nervous woman, and God
+and all his angels will hover over you, I know, and all will be well
+with you.
+
+My prayers are with you.
+
+
+
+
+To Mr. Alfred Duncan
+
+_Concerning the Ministry_
+
+
+And so you have changed your plan of life and, instead of becoming an
+experimenter with the flesh, are going to be a healer of souls.
+
+And what do I think about it? I am glad you are not to be an M.D. There
+is an era coming when the doctor will be a prehistoric creature. Oh, it
+is far, far away, but already the most progressive minds have ceased to
+regard the family physician as an infallible being.
+
+Medicine has made the least progress of any of the sciences in the last
+few centuries.
+
+Credulity has cured more people than pills.
+
+Were you to study medicine, I should advise you to take up surgery,
+osteopathy, electricity, the Kneippe Cure, milk diet, and all the
+various methods of stimulating circulation; for the people who
+patronize these treatments are increasing, as the powder and pill
+patrons are on the decrease.
+
+Then, too, I should urge you to make a careful study of mental and
+spiritual methods of cure, that you might be wholly equipped for the
+dawn of the new age. You are a young man, and you will probably live to
+see a wonderful change in the treatment of disease, and to find the
+physician of the old school relegated to the historian.
+
+But just as carefully you should now survey the religious horizon,
+before beginning your studies for the ministry.
+
+It is utterly useless to stand with lifted eyes and say, "The faith of
+my parents is good enough for me--good enough for all mankind."
+
+Had the children of ancient Salem said that, and their children repeated
+it, you would probably be lighting faggots at this moment to roast a
+"witch," instead of a brother of the opposite creed.
+
+The narrow, intolerant old dogmas have been forced into elasticity by
+the later generations, and the broadening work still goes on.
+
+It makes no difference how satisfied you may be with a prospective lake
+of fire for your enemies, the congregations you are to address will not
+listen to that style of sermon as did your grandparents.
+
+Only the ignorant minds to-day harbour ideas of cruelty and revenge in
+connection with a Creator.
+
+Thinkers find such theories inconsistent with religious belief.
+Individual thought is leading to individual faith.
+
+Where once I believed in a universal church for all the world, I now
+believe in a separate creed for each soul, one fashioned to suit his own
+particular need, with the underlying basis of love for all created
+things as its foundation.
+
+Let each man worship in his own way, and follow his own ideal of duty to
+God and humanity.
+
+If it is the pleasure of one to give up all his worldly goods, and to
+go and live and labour among the poor, wish him Godspeed; but if another
+keeps his place among men of affairs, makes money honestly, and uses it
+unselfishly, let him, too, have your blessing, since he is setting a
+good example for the worldly-minded. If one man finds himself nearer to
+God on Sunday by going out and peacefully enjoying the beauties of
+nature and the association of his kind, do not try to convince him that
+he is on the highway to perdition because he does not sit in a pew and
+listen to depressing sermons.
+
+The day is over for that type of clergyman to succeed.
+
+Make a study of the needs of men _to-day_, and suit your sermons to
+those needs.
+
+Men need to know more of the wonders of God's universe. Talk to them in
+a brief, concise, interesting manner of the recent discoveries of
+science, and their frequent remarkable corroboration of the old
+religious theories. Thousands of years ago, in Egypt and India, wise men
+said that metals and all created things possessed life, and were a part
+of one great immortal whole, of which man was the highest expression.
+
+Science is "discovering" and proving the truth of many statements made
+by those old seers and savants. Call the attention of the men of to-day
+to this fact, and set them thinking on the wonders of the immortal soul.
+
+The man of to-day is an egotist regarding his scientific achievements.
+He has grown to think of himself as a giant before whose material
+success all other things must give way. He believes that he has
+discovered, invented, photographed and made profitable all the "facts"
+of the universe, and is inclined to regard with intolerance any idea
+beyond his own mechanical domain.
+
+Tell him how much was divined thousands of years ago, and lead him to
+realize the mighty depths of the unsounded ocean of his own being.
+
+To know your own triple self, body, mind, and spirit, and to make
+yourself a complete man, with the body beautiful, the mind clear, the
+spirit radiant, is better than to have all the Bibles of the ages, in
+all their ancient languages, at your tongue's tip.
+
+Help men to the building of character, which shall enable them to be
+honest in street and mart, unselfish in home and society, and
+sympathetic to their fellow pilgrims.
+
+Salvation is gained as a house is built, brick by brick, day after day,
+not by spasmodic efforts one day in the week, and the destruction of
+that effort in the remaining six.
+
+And each man must be his own mason, and select and lay his own bricks.
+All the clergyman can do is to act the part of overseer.
+
+The man who goes to another, and expects his prayers to save him, is
+like the mason who expects the "boss" to do his work, while he draws the
+pay. Do no man's task--physical, mental, or spiritual. That is not
+friendship or religion. Your work is to stimulate others to do their own
+work, think their own thoughts, and live their own lives.
+
+The world to-day demands facts to sustain faith.
+
+_Spiritual facts are to be obtained_.
+
+Find them: for once convinced of the continuation of life beyond the
+grave, and of the necessity to earn its privileges, by self-conquest and
+character-building, humanity will rise "from the lowly earth to the
+vaulted skies," and will realize that this earth is but the anteroom to
+larger spheres of usefulness.
+
+Go forth and find--go forth and find, and do not be afraid to strike out
+of beaten paths and avoid ruts. Cultivate spiritual courage. It is what
+few clergymen possess, and it will give you individuality at least.
+
+Preach the religion of happy harmonious homes. Make men and women
+realize that heaven must begin here, in order to continue farther on,
+and that the angelic qualities, of love, sympathy, goodness,
+appreciation, must be rehearsed in the body, before they can be
+successfully enacted in full-dress angel costume with wings.
+
+God will not care for the eternal praises sung about his throne by a man
+who swears at his wife on earth, or a wife who nags her husband and
+children. It is no use expecting a role in a continuous performance of
+happiness in heaven, if you do not learn one line of the part on earth.
+
+Make your congregations think of the necessity to _live_ their religion
+in earth's commonplace daily situations.
+
+That is the religion the world needs.
+
+
+
+
+To Mr. Charles Gray
+
+_Concerning Polygamy_
+
+
+All that you say, regarding the excitement over the seating of your Salt
+Lake Senator, is quite true.
+
+I have visited your city, and have made the acquaintance of many of your
+people, and I know the private life of the gentleman you sent to
+represent you in Washington is beyond reproach.
+
+He is a good husband, a good father, a good citizen. He was born of a
+polygamous father and mother, and his childhood's home was a happy one.
+He was educated in the belief that it was wrong for a man to cohabit
+with any woman not his wife, but right for him to marry many wives.
+
+He has not married many wives, however, and does not intend to. His
+private life, his domestic life and his financial record are all clean
+and clear of stain.
+
+So much cannot be said of many other Senators and Representatives at our
+capitol.
+
+Good women are horrified when seeking government positions to find how
+the sacrifice of virtue is demanded as payment for influence.
+
+These statements cannot be evaded or denied. Let one who questions them
+investigate the conditions existing in Washington in the past and
+to-day.
+
+What a record it would be were every girl and woman who had been led
+into the path of folly by married Senators and Representatives to come
+forth and tell her story!
+
+There are clean, decent, high-minded men in both houses. There are good
+citizens, good patriots, good men there.
+
+But so long as one married seducer and misleader of women retains a seat
+in either house unmolested, so long as one man stays who is unfaithful
+to his marriage vows, the opposers of the Senator from Utah should base
+their objections on other than moral grounds.
+
+But despite the facts you bring to bear on your argument, that polygamy
+leads to more morality in the homes of the land than our present
+conditions illustrate, I must disagree with you.
+
+I am opposed to polygamy. Any social arrangement which licenses men to
+possess several women, to give full rein to their desires, is a block to
+the wheels of progress.
+
+Not until man learns the lesson of self-control, as woman has learned
+it, will humanity reach its highest development.
+
+Not until man ceases to place himself on a par with the unreasoning male
+animal, when he argues on the subject of the sexual relations, will he
+become the master of circumstance he is meant to be.
+
+One man and one woman living sexually true to each other is the ideal
+domestic life. Better strive toward that ideal, and fail and strive
+again, than to lower it and accept license and self-indulgence as the
+standard, under some religious name.
+
+Polyandry and polygamy are both evidences of a crude and half-evolved
+humanity.
+
+They belong to a society which has not learned the law of self-control
+as a part of its religious creed and the march of progress. The light of
+science makes havoc of all such primitive conditions.
+
+You tell me that your father was the husband of three wives, and that
+all lived under one roof in sisterly love, and that you never heard an
+unkind word spoken in your home, and that all three wives loved you as a
+son. You tell me your father held high ideals of womankind, and that the
+existence of a fallen woman was impossible in your community.
+
+Now I contend that any woman who accepts less than the full loyalty of
+the man to whom she gives herself for life _has fallen from woman's
+highest estate_. She lowers not only herself, but the whole sex.
+
+To take a third of a man's love, and to share his physical and mental
+and spiritual comradeship with two other wives, is far more immoral, to
+my thinking, than to take the whole of a man without legal authority.
+
+It drags down and belittles woman in the eyes of man. It is useless to
+contend that such conditions lead to respect.
+
+There is too much of the big male I, and the little female you, in the
+arrangement. There is too much of the old idea that God made man, and
+accident made woman, for man's use. There is too much of self-indulgence
+for the man, and repression for the woman,--a condition which has
+blocked the highest development of the race for centuries.
+
+Meanwhile, I think it a great pity that society does not hold the
+expectant mother in the same reverence as in your community. That is
+certainly a lesson we can learn from the Mormons. And that explains why
+your children, born of polygamous mothers, are stronger physically, and
+more universally endowed mentally, than the average children in the
+world at large.
+
+Mothers were guarded and protected and revered, and children were made
+welcome, and no such crime as darkens our own social world--the crime of
+destroying embryo life--was known in your midst.
+
+It is a glorious heritage to give a child this parental love and
+welcome. It lasts through eternity.
+
+But it does not seem to me that it is necessary to have polygamy prevail
+in order to produce right conditions for the propagation of offspring.
+In time the world will realize the importance of teaching men and women
+how to become good parents.
+
+It will learn, too, the magnificent results to be obtained from one
+moral code for both sexes, and this result could never be obtained in a
+polygamous community.
+
+
+
+
+To Walter Smeed
+
+_Concerning Creeds and Marriage_
+
+
+Before you left us, I realized that you and my pretty secretary were
+finding matters of mutual interest.
+
+Therefore, I am not surprised that you are thinking seriously of her as
+a future companion.
+
+Rosalie is a charming, intelligent, warm-hearted, excellent girl, and
+there is no reason why she would not make you a good wife, save the one
+you mention--the difference in your creeds.
+
+You are a Roman Catholic, Rosalie is a devout Protestant.
+
+Were the cases reversed, and were you the Protestant and Rosalie the
+Catholic, I should say the chances of happiness were greater than as
+conditions now stand.
+
+As a rule, the most religious man is more liberal than the religious
+woman. And when marriage between a Roman Catholic and a Protestant is
+the question, there is need of greater liberality on the part of the
+Protestant than on that of the Catholic.
+
+Why? Because with the Protestant there is no consideration to be thought
+of outside of his or her own convictions and feelings.
+
+With the Catholic, the power of the Church and the law regarding the
+rearing of the children in its faith walks beside the contracting party,
+sits at the table, and sleeps on the marital couch.
+
+There is no happiness for the husband or wife who has entered into such
+a marriage, after the arrival of children, unless the laws of the Church
+are obeyed.
+
+When the wife is a Catholic, the fact that she is a good woman and true
+wife satisfies the Protestant husband, as a rule, and he makes no
+objection to her carrying out the contract with her Church regarding the
+education of the children.
+
+If they are as moral and good as their mother, he does not care what
+faith occupies their hearts or in what way they worship God.
+
+But to the mother this is a matter of vital importance.
+
+Woman is by nature more devout than man.
+
+Woman is by nature more tyrannical than man.
+
+Take those two characteristics, and add to them the tendency of many
+women to bigotry and intolerance, and it makes the matter of creeds
+vital in marriage.
+
+Rosalie is broader-minded than many women, yet she is devoted to the
+Congregational Church, and rarely misses attendance.
+
+It will be an easy matter for her to accept your faith for yourself and
+to allow you to attend your own church, and she is, I am sure, broad
+enough to go with you occasionally, if you request it.
+
+But when she becomes a mother, and the children's minds are unfolding, I
+doubt her willingness to have them brought up in any faith save her own.
+
+To an unwedded girl in love, a child is a very indistinct creature.
+
+To a mother, it is a very real being.
+
+I have seen men as deeply in love as you are, with women as
+liberal-minded as Rosalie, become very unhappy after marriage through
+the opposite ideas of the wife regarding the education of children.
+
+You must remember how much more closely a mother's life is entwined
+about her children, and how much more of their association usually falls
+to her than to the father.
+
+This is especially true of daughters, and is true of sons up to a
+certain age.
+
+You can understand, I am sure, how much more companionship a mother
+would find in children who accepted her faith and attended her church
+than in those whose spiritual paths led in another direction.
+
+I know Rosalie realizes that a good life, not a certain creed, leads to
+the goal she seeks, after this phase of existence closes, and she does
+not ask you to change your faith. But while she would also believe her
+children were on the road to that goal, she would want them to walk
+through her path and by her side.
+
+It will be hard to relinquish the woman you love, to-day, for the
+children who might not come to-morrow.
+
+Yet I can give you the counsel you asked on this matter only from my
+personal observation of similar unions.
+
+I should advise you to try an absence of some duration, and to forget
+Rosalie if you can, since you have not yet declared yourself.
+
+Better a little temporary sorrow than a life of discord.
+
+As you grow older your religion will, in all probability, gain a
+stronger ascendency over your nature, and the church to which you belong
+is very tenacious in its hold upon its members.
+
+Rosalie is not of a yielding nature, and as I said before, she is more
+devoted to her church than most young women of the day.
+
+The physical phases of your love blind you now. But these phases are
+only a part of the tie which must bind husband and wife to make love
+enduring through all of life's vicissitudes.
+
+There must be mental companionship, and to be a complete union there
+must be sympathy in spiritual ideas.
+
+The very young do not realize this fact, but it is forced upon the
+mature.
+
+Marital love is like a tree. It first roots in the soil of earth, and
+then lifts its branches to the heavens. Unless it does so lift its
+branches it is stunted and deformed, and is not a tree. Unless it roots
+in earth it is not a tree, but an air-plant or a cobweb.
+
+You want to be sure the tree you are thinking to make a shelter for your
+whole life, will have far-reaching and uplifting branches, and will not
+be merely an earth-bound twig.
+
+Since your church permits no second marriage save by the door of death,
+do not make a mistake in your first.
+
+Take a year, at least, of absence and separation, and think the matter
+over.
+
+
+
+
+To Sybyl Marchmont
+
+_Concerning Her Determination to Remain Single_
+
+
+It is with genuine regret that I learn of your determination to send my
+nephew out of your life. Wilfred is a royal fellow, as that term is
+employed by us. He is what a man of royal descent in monarchies rarely
+proves to be,--self-reliant, enterprising, industrious, clean, and with
+high ideals of woman.
+
+Eight years ago I declined a request of his for a loan, and told him my
+reasons--that I believed loans were an injury to our friends or
+relatives. My letter seemed to arouse all the strength latent in his
+nature, and he has made a remarkable record for himself since that time.
+I have known that he was deeply in love with you for the last two years,
+and I had hoped you would listen to his plea. He tells me that you
+imparted your history to him, and that you say it is your intention to
+remain single, as you would not like to bring children into the world to
+suffer from the stigma upon your name. He has shown me your letter
+wherein you say, "I am not in fault for having to blush for the sins of
+my parents; but I would be in fault if my children had to blush for the
+blemish upon the name of their grandparents. I do not feel I could meet
+their questioning eyes when they asked me about my parents. I can better
+bear the loss of the personal happiness of a home and a husband's love."
+
+Wilfred is just the man to protect you and to keep the world at a
+distance, where it could not affect your life by its comments. He
+regards your birth in the same light that I do, and would rather
+transmit your lovely qualities of soul and mind to his descendants than
+the traits of many proudly born girls who are ready to take him at the
+first asking: for you must know how popular he is with our sex.
+
+I can not believe you are insensible to his magnetic and lovable
+qualities, but, as you say, you have been so saddened by the sudden
+knowledge of your history that it has blunted your emotions in other
+directions. I can only hope this will wear away and that you will
+reconsider your resolve and consent to make Wilfred the happy and proud
+man you could, by becoming his wife.
+
+_Never forget that God created love and man created marriage_.
+
+And to be born of a loveless union is a darker blight than to be born in
+love without union.
+
+But what I want to talk about now, is your determination to live a
+single life and to devote yourself to reclaiming weak and erring women.
+You are young to enter this field of work, yet at twenty-four you are
+older than many women of thirty-five, because you have had the
+prematurely ripening rain of sorrow on your life. I know you will go
+into the work you mention with the sympathy and understanding which
+alone can make any reformatory work successful. Yet you are going to
+encounter experiences which will shock and pain you, in ways you do not
+imagine now.
+
+You are starting out with the idea of most sympathetic good women, that
+all erring souls of their own sex fall through betrayed trust, and
+broken promises, and misplaced love. Such cases you will encounter, and
+they will most readily respond to your efforts for their reformation.
+But many of those you seek to aid will have gone on the road to folly
+through mercenary motives, and this will prove a vast obstacle.
+
+When a woman sells to Mammon, under any stress of circumstance, that
+which belongs to Cupid, there is something left out of her nature and
+character which renders the efforts of the reformers almost useless. You
+know all real, lasting reform must come from within. The woman who has
+once decided that fine apparel, and comfort, and leisure, are of more
+value to her than her virtue usually reaches old age or disease before
+the reformer can even gain her attention. You will find many such among
+your protegees, and you may as well leave them to work out their own
+reformation, and turn your energies to those who long for a better life.
+
+It is that longing which means real reformation. To paraphrase an old
+couplet--
+
+  The soul reformed against its will
+  Clings to the same old vices still.
+
+I do not believe in a forced morality, save as a protection to a
+community. I believe in it as a legal fence, but it possesses no value
+as a religious motive. It helps to save society some annoyance, but it
+does not materially improve the condition of humanity. Such improvements
+must come from the desire of men and women to reach higher standards.
+So, after you have planted a little seed in the mind of the mercenary
+Magdalene which may in time sprout and grow, pass on, and find those who
+have gone wrong from other causes, and who are longing for a hand to
+lead them right.
+
+And of all things do not expect a girl who has lived in the glare of red
+lights, and listened to the blare of bands, and worn the ofttimes
+becoming garb of folly, and stimulated her spirits with intoxicants--do
+not expect her, I say, to suddenly be contented with quiet and solitude,
+and drudgery, and cheap, unlovely garments, and goodness. Give her
+something to entertain her and to occupy her mind, give her something to
+live for and hope for and to be pleased over, besides the mere fact of
+reformation. The opium victim, you must remember, can not at once
+partake of wholesome food and be well and happy in the thought that he
+has given up his drug. Neither can the folly victim. The standards of
+happiness and contentment which the moral woman has always found
+satisfactory, she too often considers sufficient for the sister who has
+wandered from the path. But they are standards which, once lost, must be
+gained step by step, painfully and slowly. They are not reached by a
+bound. As much as possible keep your reformed sister's mind from
+dwelling on the past, or from talking of her mistakes and sins. Blot
+them from her memory by new and interesting plans and occupations. The
+way to live a new life is to live it.
+
+And our thoughts and conversation are important parts of living. Instead
+of praying aloud to God to forgive her sins, show the God spirit in
+yourself by forgiving and forgetting and helping her to forget.
+
+And now a word about yourself.
+
+You are twenty-four, lovely, sympathetic, fond of children and animals,
+wholesome and normal in your habits, without crankiness, and popular
+with both sexes. While there are many wives and widows possessed of
+these qualities, there seems to be some handicap to the spinster in the
+race of life who undertakes to arrive at middle age with all the womanly
+attributes. Almost invariably she drops some of them by the wayside. She
+becomes overorderly and fussy--so that association with her for any
+length of time is insupportable--or careless and indifferent. Or she may
+grow inordinately devoted to animal pets, and bitter and critical toward
+children and married people.
+
+She may develop mannish traits, and dress and appear more like a man
+than a feminine woman.
+
+She may ride a hobby, to the discomfort of all other equestrians or
+pedestrians on the earth's highway. She may grow so argumentative and
+positive that she is intolerant and intolerable. And whichever of these
+peculiarities are hers, she is quite sure to be wholly unconscious of
+it, while she is quick to see that of another. Now watch yourself, my
+dear Sybyl, as you walk alone toward middle life; do not allow yourself
+to grow queer or impossible. It was God's intent that every plant should
+blossom and bear fruit, and that every human being should mate and
+produce offspring. The plant that fails in any of its functions is
+usually blighted in some way, and the woman who fails of life's full
+experiences seems to show some repellent peculiarity. But she need not,
+once she sets a watch upon herself; she has a conscious soul and mind,
+and can control such tendencies if she will.
+
+It is unnatural for a woman to live without the daily companionship of
+man. The superior single woman must make tenfold the effort of the
+inferior wife, to maintain her balance into maturity, because of her
+enforced solitude. As the wife-mother grows older she is kept in touch
+with youth, and with the world, while the opportunities for close
+companionship with the young lessen as a single woman passes forty,
+unless she makes herself especially adaptable, agreeable, and
+sympathetic.
+
+And this is what I want you to do. At twenty-four it is none too soon to
+begin planning for a charming maturity.
+
+If you are determined upon a life of celibacy, determine also to be the
+most wholesome, and normal, and all around liberal, womanly spinster the
+world has ever seen.
+
+Peace and happiness to you in your chosen lot.
+
+
+
+
+To Mrs. Charles Gordon
+
+_Concerning Her Sister and Her Children_
+
+
+No, my dear Edna, I do not think it strange that you should seek advice
+on this subject from a woman who has no living children.
+
+It seems to me no one is fitted to give such unbiased counsel regarding
+the training of children as the woman of observation, sympathy, and
+feeling, who has none of her own.
+
+Had I offspring, I would be influenced by my own successes, and
+prejudiced by my own failures, and unable to put myself in your place,
+as I now do.
+
+A mother rarely observes other people's children, save to compare them
+unfavourably with her own. I regret to say that motherhood with the
+average woman seems to be a narrowing experience, and renders her less
+capable of taking a large, unselfish view of humanity.
+
+The soldier in the thick of battle is able to tell only of what he
+personally experienced and saw, just in the spot where he was engaged in
+action.
+
+The general who sits outside the fray and watches the contest can form a
+much clearer idea of where the mistakes occurred, and where the greatest
+skill was displayed.
+
+I am that general, my dear friend, standing outside the field of
+motherhood, and viewing the efforts of my battling sisters to rear
+desirable men and women. And I am glad you have appealed to me while
+your two children are yet babies to give you counsel, for I can tell you
+where thousands have failed.
+
+And I thank you and your husband for reposing so much confidence in my
+ideas.
+
+I think, perhaps, we had better speak of the postscript of your letter
+first. You ask my opinion regarding the chaperon for your
+sixteen-year-old sister, who is going abroad to study for a period of
+years. Mrs. Walton will take her and keep her in her home in Paris, and
+Miss Brown also stands ready to make her one of three young girls she
+desires to chaperon and guide through a foreign course of study in
+France and Germany.
+
+You like the idea of having your sister in a home without the
+association of other American girls, until she perfects herself in
+French, but you are worried about Mrs. Walton's being a divorced woman.
+Miss Brown, the spotless spinster, seems the safer guide to your
+friends, you tell me.
+
+I know the majority of women would feel that a single woman of good
+standing and ungossiped reputation was a safe and desirable protector
+for a young girl.
+
+The same majority would hesitate to send their girls away with a
+divorced woman.
+
+But as I remarked in the beginning, I have stood outside the fray and
+watched similar ventures, and I have grown to realize that it is not
+mere respectability and chastity in a woman which make her a safe
+chaperon for a young girl,--it is a deep, full, broad understanding of
+temperaments and temptations.
+
+Had I a daughter or a sister like your sweet Millie, I would not allow
+her to live one year under the dominion of such a woman as Miss Brown
+for any consideration. Why? because Miss Brown is all brain and bigotry.
+She is narrow and high, not deep and broad.
+
+She is so orthodox that she incites heresy in the rebellious mind of
+independent youth. She is so moral she makes one long for adventure. She
+would not listen to any questioning of old traditions, or any
+speculative philosophizing of a curious young mind, and she would be
+intolerant with any girl who showed an inclination to flirt or be
+indiscreet.
+
+Your sister Millie is as coquettish as the rose that lifts its fair face
+to the sun, and the breeze, and the bee, and expects to be admired. She
+is as innocent as the rose, too, but that fact Miss Brown would never
+associate with coquetry.
+
+She would class it with vulgarity and degeneracy. Miss Brown is a
+handsome woman, but she has no sex instincts. She does not believe with
+the scientist, "that in the process of evolution it is only with the
+coming of the sex relation that life is enabled to rise to higher
+forms."
+
+She believes in brain and spirit, and is utterly devoid of that feminine
+impulse to make herself attractive to men, and wholly incapable of
+understanding the fascination that Folly holds out to youth. She has
+never experienced any temptation, and she would be shocked at any girl
+who fell below her standard.
+
+She would carefully protect Millie from danger by high walls, but she
+would never eradicate the danger impulse from her nature by sympathetic
+counsel, as a more human woman could.
+
+Mrs. Walton is a much better guide for your sister.
+
+She ran away from boarding-school at seventeen, and married the reckless
+son of a rich man. She had a stepmother of the traditional type, and
+had never known a happy home life. She was of a loving and trusting and
+at the same time a coquettish nature, and she attracted young Walton's
+eye while out for a walk with a "Miss Brown" order of duenna. The
+duenna saw the little embryo flirtation, and became very much horrified,
+and preached the girl a long sermon, and set a close watch upon her
+actions.
+
+There was no wise, loving guidance of a young girl's life barque from
+the reefs of adventure. It was homily and force. The result was, that
+the girl escaped from school before six weeks passed, and married her
+admirer.
+
+He was fifteen years her senior, a reckless man of the world, even older
+in experience than in years. He proved a very bad husband, but his young
+wife remained with him until his own father urged her to leave him. She
+was quietly divorced, and has lived abroad almost ever since, and holds
+an excellent position in the French capital, as well as in other
+European centres, and she is most exemplary in her life. Mr. Walton is
+now an inmate of a sanitarium, a victim of paresis.
+
+I can imagine no one so well fitted to exert the wisest influence upon
+Millie's life as Mrs. Walton.
+
+There is a woman who has run the whole gamut of girlish folly, and who
+knows all the phases of temptation. She knows what it is to possess
+physical attractions, and to be flattered by the admiration of men, and
+she has passed through the dark waters of disillusion and sorrow. She
+would be the one to help Millie out of dangerous places by sympathy and
+understanding, instead of using sermons and keys.
+
+She would mould her young, wax-like character by the warmth of love,
+instead of freezing it by austere axioms.
+
+Miss Brown would make an indiscreet young girl feel hopelessly vulgar
+and immodest; Mrs. Walton that she understood all about her foolish
+pranks, and was able to lead her in the better paths.
+
+Miss Brown prides herself upon never having lost her head with any man.
+
+Mrs. Walton is like some other women I have known, who have made
+mistakes of judgment. She lost her head, but in the losing and the
+sorrow that ensued she found a heart for all humanity.
+
+There are women in this world whose cold-white chastity freezes the poor
+wayfarer who tries to find in their vicinity rest and comfort and
+courage.
+
+Other women cast a cooling shadow, in which the sun-scorched pilgrim
+finds peace--the shadow of a past error, from which spring fragrant
+ferns and sweet grasses, where tired and bleeding feet may softly tread.
+
+Mrs. Walton's life casts the shadow of divorce on her pathway, but it is
+only the warm, restful shadow of a ripening and mellowing sorrow. Do not
+fear to have Millie walk in it.
+
+It will be better for her than the steady glare from a glacier.
+
+I find I have said so much about your sister that I must reserve my
+counsel about your children for another letter.
+
+Your postscript was brief, but pregnant with suggestion, and called for
+this long reply.
+
+I shall write you again in a few days.
+
+
+
+
+To Mrs. Charles Gordon
+
+_Concerning Her Children_
+
+
+Your wish to have your son, who is now four years old, begin to develop
+the manly qualities, and your oldest daughter, who has reached the
+mature age of three, start wisely on the path to lovely womanhood, is
+far from being premature.
+
+"The tree inclines as the twig is bent," we are told.
+
+Most mothers wait until the tree is in blossom before they begin to
+train its inclination.
+
+Your boy is quite old enough to be taught manly pride, in being useful
+to you and his sisters.
+
+Such things are not successfully taught by preaching or scolding or
+punishing; but are more easily inculcated by tact and praise,
+object-lesson and play.
+
+A four-year-old boy is all ears when his father's praises and
+achievements are recounted. Any father, save a brute, is a hero in the
+eyes of his four-year-old son. I am sure Mr. Gordon has many admirable
+traits you can use as interesting topics.
+
+Tell little Charlie how proud you are to have a son who will be like his
+father, and attend to the needs of and look after the interests of his
+mother and sisters.
+
+Make him think that to be of service to you or his sisters is one of the
+first steps toward manhood, as indeed it is.
+
+When he performs any small kindness, praise his manliness.
+
+Teach him to open doors, and to make way for women and elders, as a part
+of manly courtesy.
+
+Speak with gentle disapproval of the unfortunately common type of
+American boy who pushes women and older people aside to scramble into
+public conveyances and secure a seat before them.
+
+Say how proud you are that your son could not be guilty of such unmanly
+conduct.
+
+When you are walking with him, call his attention to any woman or child
+or poor man in trouble, and if his services can be of use, urge him to
+offer them.
+
+I saw one day a small boy spring to the aid of an old coloured woman who
+had dropped a lot of parcels in the street, and I thought it was a
+certain evidence that his mother was a rare and sweet woman. For the
+manners of little boys are almost invariably what their mothers make
+them.
+
+Awake early in his heart a sympathy for the deformed, the crippled, and
+otherwise unfortunate beings.
+
+There is no other country where such vulgar and heartless curiosity, and
+even ridicule, is bestowed upon grotesque or unsightly types of
+humanity, as in America.
+
+A little dwarfed girl in New York City committed suicide a few years
+ago because she was so weary of being laughed at and ridiculed by her
+associates in the street and at school.
+
+Think of that, in this Christian age, and in the metropolis of America!
+
+An old street peddler was set upon by school-children and so annoyed and
+misused that he became insane.
+
+Another was injured by street children--the children of the public
+schools--and died from the effects of their abuse.
+
+This is the fault of mothers who have never deemed it their duty and
+privilege to awaken the tender and protective qualities in the character
+of their children.
+
+Speak often to your boy of the pathos of dumb animals dependent upon
+human thoughtfulness for food, drink, and decent usage.
+
+Say what a privilege it seems to you to be able to befriend them, and to
+be a voice for them in making others realize their duty to our dumb
+brothers.
+
+Obtain interesting books on natural history and read stories of animal
+life to your boy. Instruct him in the habits of beast, bird, and insect,
+and talk to him of the wonderful domestic instincts and affections in
+many of our speechless associates. The exhilaration of the wild bird,
+and the happiness of the deer and the hare in the woods and fields, call
+to his mind day by day. It will be more gratifying to you when he is man
+grown to feel he is the loving friend and protector, rather than the
+skilled hunter of bird and beast.
+
+The higher order of man does not seek slaughter for amusement. He
+realizes that he has no right to take, save for self-protection, that
+which he cannot give.
+
+Make your son a higher order of man by developing those brain cells and
+leaving the destructive and cruel portions of the brain to shrink from
+lack of use.
+
+Even in his play with his inanimate toys, you can be arousing the best
+or the worst part of your boy's nature.
+
+The child who whips and screams at his hobby-horse usually, when a man,
+whips and bellows at his flesh and blood steed.
+
+Tell him the play-horse is more easily managed by coaxing and petting,
+and that loud voices make it nervous and frightened.
+
+Suggest water and feed at suitable times, and express sorrow for the
+horses with no kind boys to look out for them.
+
+Start a humane society in the nursery and make your boy president and
+your little girl honorary member, and act as treasurer and secretary
+yourself.
+
+Give him a medal when he offers food to a hungry street animal or speaks
+to a driver cruel to his horse, or performs any other kind act. This
+will be interesting play to your children, and it will be sowing seed in
+fallow ground.
+
+Your baby girl is already old enough to take pride in picking up the
+toys she scatters, and putting her chair where it belongs. Make it a
+part of your hour of sport with her to help her do these things. She
+will not know she is being taught order.
+
+I learned this lesson from a famous author whose baby son was anxious
+to play about the library where his father was at work.
+
+The first act of the toddler was to toss all the books in sight upon the
+floor and to sit down and turn the leaves, hunting for pictures. This
+performance interested him for half an hour, when he proceeded to seek
+new fields of action.
+
+"But now let us have great fun putting all the books back just where we
+found them," cried the tactful father, with a wink and a laugh, which
+made the child believe he was to enjoy the sport of his life. And it
+_was_ made sport by the foolish pranks of the father who knew how little
+it took to interest a child.
+
+The next day, and the next, the same fall and rise in the book market
+took place, but on the fourth day the father was too deeply engrossed in
+work to assist in the replacing of the books: when, lo! the small lad,
+after a wistful waiting and unanswered call, proceeded to put the books
+all back alone.
+
+_The first important brick in the foundation wall of order was laid_.
+
+So you can teach your little girl all the womanly habits of method, and
+order, and neatness, and system, if you have the patience to act the
+part of playmate with her a few moments daily.
+
+As she grows in understanding and years, keep yourself at her side, her
+nearest friend. Let her feel that she can express her every thought to
+you, and that every question which presents itself to her developing
+mind, you will seek to answer to the best of your ability.
+
+Be her confidant, her adviser, her friend, and let her find pride and
+happiness in doing things for you.
+
+Never act as maid or domestic to your daughter.
+
+Be the queen and make her your first lady-in-waiting, and show her the
+courtesy and appreciation her position demands from royalty. She will be
+a better daughter, and a better wife and mother, later in life, if you
+do not make the mistake of the average American mother of waiting upon
+her from the cradle to the altar. Let her grow up with the quiet
+understanding that you are to be first considered, in matters social and
+financial. Your wardrobe must be as well looked after as her own, and if
+there is to be economy for one, let her practise it.
+
+The daughter who has a whole household sacrificing and toiling for her
+pleasures is spoiled for a wife and woman. The most admirable young
+women I have known--and I have known many--are those who were taught to
+take it as a matter of course that the mother was first to be
+considered, and lovingly served.
+
+Do not be afraid of making your daughter vain by telling her the
+attractive features she may possess.
+
+Some one else will if you do not, and it is well for her to hear it from
+lips which may more successfully offer counsel afterward. A certain
+confidence in her own charms gives a sensibly reared young woman a poise
+and self-possession which is to be desired. A touch of feminine vanity
+renders a woman more anxious to please, and more alert to keep always at
+her best.
+
+But beware of having her acquire egotism. Silly conceit is the
+death-blow to higher attainments and to all charm.
+
+Teach your daughter early the accomplishment of listening well. She will
+be certain to please if she understands its value.
+
+A woman who looks the converser in the eyes, and does not allow her
+glance to wander and become distrait, and who does not interrupt before
+the recital is finished, can be sure of popularity with both men and
+women.
+
+Give both your son and daughter confidence in themselves and belief in
+their power to achieve. There is tremendous power in the early
+inoculation by the home influence of self-confidence, when it is
+tempered by modesty and consideration for others.
+
+Remember whatever in your own bringing up seems to-day unfortunate, and
+avoid it in the training of your children.
+
+Remember whatever was good and helpful, and emulate it.
+
+
+
+
+To Miss Zoe Clayborn Artist
+
+_Concerning the Attentions of Married Men_
+
+
+I am sure, my dear niece, that you are a good and pure-minded girl, and
+that you mean to live a life above reproach, and I fully understand your
+rebellion against many of the conventional forms which are incompatible
+with the career of a "girl bachelor," as you like to call yourself. But
+let us look at the subject from all sides, while you are on the
+threshold of life, in the morning of your career, and before you have
+made any more serious mistakes than the one you mention.
+
+For it was a mistake when you accepted Mr. Gordon's telephone message to
+lunch alone with him at a restaurant, even though you knew his wife
+might not object.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Gordon are happily married, parents of several children.
+They are broader and more liberal and more unselfish than most parents,
+and they went out of their path to extend courtesies to you, a young
+country girl--at first because you were my niece, then because they
+liked you personally.
+
+When I first wrote Mrs. Gordon that you were to open a studio in Chicago
+after your course of study in the East, she expressed deep interest in
+you, and seemed anxious to have you consider her as a friend--always
+ready to act as a chaperon or adviser when you felt the need of wiser
+guidance than your own impulses.
+
+Mrs. Gordon knew that your experience of the world was limited to a
+country village in the West, and two years' study at the Pratt
+Institute. While there she knew you boarded with a cousin of your
+mother's, and enjoyed the association and privileges of the daughters of
+the home.
+
+To start alone in Chicago, and live in your studio, and dine from a
+chafing-dish, and sleep in an unfolded combination bureau and
+refrigerator--has more fascinations to your mind than to Mrs. Gordon's.
+She was reared in comfort, bordering on luxury, and while her early home
+life was not happy, she enjoyed all the refinements and all the
+privileges of protected girlhood.
+
+She knows city life as you cannot know it, and, although she discards
+many of the burden-some conventions of society, she realizes the
+necessity of observing some of its laws.
+
+She wanted you to feel that you had the background of a wholesome home,
+and the protection of clean, well-behaved married friends in your
+exposed situation; her attitude to you is just what she would want
+another woman to hold toward her daughter, were she grown up and alone
+in a large city.
+
+You have been her guest, and she has been your good friend. Mr. Gordon
+admired you from the first, and that was a new incentive for this most
+tactful and liberal of wives to befriend you. She always cultivates the
+women he likes.
+
+This is excellent policy on the part of a wife. If the husband has any
+really noble qualities or possesses a sterling character, he will
+appreciate and respect his wife's confidence, and never violate it; and
+added to this, he will usually become disillusioned with the women he
+has admired from a distance, when he sees them frequently at too close
+range.
+
+A wife can make no greater mistake than trying to fence her husband
+about and obtruding high walls between him and the women he admires. Far
+better bring them near and turn on the calcium light.
+
+Mr. Gordon is a born lover of the fair sex, a born gallant. He is, at
+the same time, a clean, self-respecting man. But he has grown a trifle
+selfish and a bit vain of late years.
+
+He does not fully realize what the interesting family of children he
+shows with such pride to his friends has meant to their mother.
+
+It has not occurred to him that to be the mother of three children, the
+youngest one year old, after six years of married life, has required a
+greater outlay of all the mental, moral, and physical forces than has
+been demanded of their father.
+
+He is a good husband,--yet he is not the absolutely unselfish and
+liberal and thoughtful husband that Mrs. Gordon is wife.
+
+If she seemed to you at all nervous, or less adaptable to your moods
+than he, you should stop and consider the many causes which might have
+led to this condition.
+
+You are young, handsome, gifted, and unconventional, and all these
+things appeal to men. You can attract all the admirers you want, and
+more than you need, to enlarge your ideas of life, and extend your
+knowledge of human nature.
+
+You say your ambition is to know the world thoroughly,--that it will aid
+your art.
+
+I think that is true, if you do not pass the border-line and lose your
+ideals and sacrifice your principles. Once you do that, your art will
+lose what it can never regain.
+
+And remember this, my dear girl, no human being ever lived or ever will
+live who gained anything worth having _by sacrificing the golden rule._
+In your search for knowledge of the world, and acquaintance with human
+nature, _keep that motto ever before your soul's sight,_ "Do unto
+others as you would have them do unto you."
+
+You say Mr. Gordon said or did nothing in that tete-a-tete luncheon his
+wife might not have heard or seen, but the fact that he talked entirely
+about you and art, and other universal subjects, and seemingly avoided
+any reference to his wife and children, surprised you.
+
+And now you are wondering if you did wrong to accept this invitation.
+Never accept invitations of any kind from married men, unless the wife
+or some member of the family is included.
+
+No matter how willing the wife may be to have you enjoy her husband's
+company, avoid tete-a-tete situations with benedicts.
+
+You say you are not egotistical enough to imagine Mr. Gordon had any
+hidden motive for wanting to be alone with you, or for seemingly
+forgetting in his conversation that he was a husband and father. Yet I
+can see that in a measure it disillusioned you.
+
+You do not ask a man to fling his wife and children at the head of each
+woman he meets, but you like him to recognize their existence.
+
+You are a young, romantic girl seeking the ideal.
+
+You want to find happy wives and husbands,--men and women who have
+sailed away from the Strands of Imagination to the more beautiful land
+of the Real, from whose shores they beckon you, saying: "Here is
+happiness and great joy. Come and join us, and feel no fear in flinging
+the illusions of youth behind you."
+
+If married men only knew that is what young women are seeking,--if
+married women only knew that is what young men are seeking, what
+reconstruction would take place in the deportment of husbands and wives!
+
+Never yet did a married woman indulge in flirtatious or sentimental
+converse with a bachelor without lowering herself and all women in his
+heart of hearts.
+
+Never yet did a married man seem to forget his domestic ties in the
+presence of single women without losing a portion of their respect,
+however they may have been flattered by his attentions.
+
+In every man's heart, in every woman's, is this longing to find husbands
+and wives who are satisfied and happy and proud, above all other things,
+of their loyalty.
+
+It would be well for you to keep this fact before the minds of the men
+you meet. You can, in a small way, do your little toward educating on
+this subject the married men you encounter. And you can save yourself
+some embarrassing experiences.
+
+It is no compliment to you if the husband of your friend, or a stranger,
+falls in love with you.
+
+It is an easy matter for a young, attractive woman to infatuate
+irresponsible men.
+
+It is a far greater compliment to you when women respect and trust you,
+and when you help elevate the ideals of weak men regarding your sex.
+
+You can study the whole Encyclopedia of Manhood without breaking through
+the glass doors of your friend's bookcases. And you can live a free,
+unconventional life without sacrificing one principle, though you may
+ignore some customs. It is not the custom in conventional society for
+young women to go to theatres or dinners alone with young men. Yet I am
+perfectly willing you should join the large army of self-supporting,
+self-respecting, and well educated girls who do these things. You have
+been reared with that American idea of independence, and with that
+confidence in your ability to protect your virtue and good name, which
+carries the vast majority of our young women safely through all the
+vicissitudes of youth, and sends them chaste wives to the altar. Our
+American men understand this attitude of our girls, and half of them
+respect it, without being forced to, as the other half can be, if woman
+so wills.
+
+There is no reason, to my thinking, why you should not enjoy the
+companionship of interesting bachelors and widowers, and take the
+courtesies they offer, with no chaperon but your own pride, taste, and
+will. So long as you know, and these men know, that you are doing
+nothing and going nowhere you need remember with shame or regret, the
+next day, just so long you are on no dangerous path.
+
+But you must draw the line at married men, happy or unhappy. Any
+confidential, tete-a-tete companionship of a single woman with a married
+man cheapens her in the eyes of all other men and women.
+
+It is a simpler matter to drift into free and easy manners and call them
+"bohemian" than to cleanse your reputation of their stain, or lift your
+mind from the mire to which they inevitably lead.
+
+Once a woman begins to excuse her lawless conduct on the ground of her
+"artistic temperament," there are no depths to which she may not sink.
+
+Take pride in being at once independent yet discreet; artistic, yet
+sensible; a student of men, yet an example of high-minded womanhood; an
+open foe to needless conventions, yet a staunch friend of principles;
+daring in methods, yet irreproachable in conduct; and however adored by
+men, worthy of trust by all women.
+
+Do not take the admiration of men too seriously. Waste no vitality in a
+rage over their weaknesses and vices. Regard them with patience and
+inspire them to strive for a better goal than self-indulgence.
+
+You can safely take it for granted that many who approach you with
+compliments for your charms, and pleas for your favours, would make the
+same advances to any other attractive girl they chanced to encounter.
+
+Too many young women mistake a habit for a grand passion. And they
+forget, while they are studying man, that he is studying woman, and
+testing her susceptibility to flattery and her readiness to believe in
+his simulated infatuation.
+
+Do not fall into the error of so many young country girls in a large
+city, and imagine you can establish new laws, create a new order of
+things, and teach men new lessons.
+
+A great city is like an ever-burning fire,--the newcomers who thrust in
+their fingers will be scorched and scarred, but the fire will not be
+changed or extinguished.
+
+_Keep out of the fire_.
+
+There is no reason why you should scar yourself or smoke your garments
+while keeping comfortably warm.
+
+
+
+
+To Mr. Charles Gordon
+
+_Concerning the Jealousy of His Wife After Seven Years of Married Life_
+
+
+I have read your letter with care. I can readily understand that you
+would not appeal to your wife's mother in this matter upon which you
+write me, as she has been the typical mother-in-law,--the woman who
+never gets along well with her children, and who never wants others to
+succeed where she fails. I recollect your telling me how she marred the
+wedding ceremony, by weeping and fainting, after having nagged her poor
+daughter during twenty years of life, and interfered with her
+friendships, through that peculiar jealousy which she misnamed "devoted
+love."
+
+And now you are afraid that your wife is developing the same
+propensity, and you ask me to use my influence to cure her of it in its
+incipiency. You think I stand closer to Edna than any other friend.
+
+"It is only during the last two or three years that Edna has shown this
+tendency," you say. "Until then she seemed to me the most sensible and
+liberal-minded of women, always admiring the people I liked, and even
+going out of her way to be courteous and cordial to a woman I praised.
+Of late she has seemed so different, and has often been sarcastic, or
+sulky, or hysterical, when I showed the common gallantries of a man fond
+of the society of ladies."
+
+You think it is her inherited tendency cropping out, and that she is
+unconscious of it herself.
+
+Well now permit me, my dear Mr. Gordon, to be very frank with you.
+
+I met your wife only once before she married you.
+
+She was a merry-hearted, healthy girl, with superb colour, and the
+figure of a young Venus. She was a belle, and much admired by many
+worth-while men.
+
+During her honeymoon, she wrote me a most charming letter speaking of
+her happiness, and of her desire to make you an ideal wife.
+
+You and Edna were my guests for a few days when your first child was a
+year old. She seemed more beautiful than ever, with an added spiritual
+charm, and you were the soul of devotion.
+
+You are the type of man who pays a compliment as naturally as he
+breathes, and whose vision is a sensitive plate which retains an
+impression of every feminine grace. This impression is developed in the
+memory-room afterward, and framed in your conversation.
+
+The ordinary mind calls such a man a flirt, or, in common parlance, "a
+jollier;" but I know you to be merely appreciative of womankind in
+general, while your heart is beautifully loyal to its ideal. You are a
+clean, wholesome man, who could not descend to intrigue. You are
+fine-looking, and you possess a gift in conversing.
+
+Of course women are attracted to you. Edna was proud of this fact, and
+seemed to genuinely enjoy your popularity.
+
+That was five years ago.
+
+One year ago I visited your home. Edna was the mother of three children,
+born during the first five years of marriage.
+
+She had sacrificed her bloom to her babies, and was pallid and anaemic.
+Her form had lost its exquisites curves, and she seemed years older than
+her age--older indeed than you, although she is four years your junior.
+It is a mere incident to be a father of three children. It is a lifetime
+experience to be their mother. She had developed nerves, and tears came
+as readily as laughter came of old.
+
+She was devoted to her children, and felt a deep earnestness regarding
+her responsibility as a mother. But she was still the intensely loving
+wife, while you had sunk your role of lover-husband in that of adoring
+father.
+
+You did not seem to think of Edna's delicate state of health, or notice
+her fading beauty. You regarded her as a faithful nurse for your
+children, and whenever you spoke of her it was as the mother, not as the
+sweetheart and wife.
+
+When I mentioned the drain upon a woman's vitality to bring three robust
+children into life in five years, you said it was only a "natural
+function," and referred to the old-time families of ten and twelve
+children. Your grandmother had fourteen, you said, and was the picture
+of health at seventy-five.
+
+My own grandmother gave ten children to the world. But we must recollect
+how different was the environment in those days.
+
+Our grandmothers lived in the country, and knew none of the strain and
+excitement of these modern times. The high pressure of social and
+financial conditions, as we know them, the effort to live up to the
+modern standards, the congested city life and the expensive country
+life, all these things make motherhood a different ordeal for our women
+than our grandmothers. Where our grandfathers took their share of the
+care and guidance of children, and the children came up in a wholesome
+country fashion, our men to-day are so driven by the money gadfly that
+they can only whirl around and around and attend "to business," and all
+the care of the children falls upon the mother, or else upon the nurses
+and governesses, who in turn are a care and a worry to the wife.
+
+You assured me Edna had all the assistants in caring for her children
+she wanted, but you did not realize that every paid employe in a
+household is, as a rule, just so much more care to the mistress, not
+less than a tax on the husband's purse and, consequently, on his time.
+
+What Edna craves is _your_ love, _your_ attention, _your_ sympathy, not
+the service of paid domestics. She wants you to notice her fading bloom,
+and to take her in your arms and say, tenderly, "Little girl, we must
+get those old roses back. And we must go away for a new honeymoon, all
+alone, and forget every care, even if we forget the babies for a few
+days."
+
+One little speech like that, one little outing like that, would do more
+toward driving away the demon of jealousy than all I could by a thousand
+sermons and homilies.
+
+I remember at your own board you made me uncomfortable talking about my
+complexion, which you chose to say was "remarkable for a woman of my
+age." And then you proceeded to describe some wonderful beauty you had
+seen at the Country Club the day previous, and all the time I saw the
+tears hidden back under the lids of Edna's tired eyes, and a hurt look
+on her pale face. Do you imagine she was _jealous_ of your compliment to
+me? or of your praise of the girl's beauty at the Country Club?
+
+No, no, my dear Mr. Gordon, I know Edna too well to accuse her of such
+petty feelings. She was only hurt at your lack of taste in accenting her
+own lost bloom by needlessly emphasizing another's possession of what
+had once been hers.
+
+Yet she called upon the young lady that very day and invited her to
+luncheon, and even then you indulged in pronounced admiration of the
+guest's cheeks, gallantly requesting your wife to have the bouquet of
+carnation pinks removed from the table, as they were so shamed by the
+complexions of the ladies.
+
+Of course it was gracefully worded in the plural, but your pallid wife
+could not claim her share of it, and you should have realized the fact.
+And the reason she could not was that she had sacrificed her health in
+your service, in giving your children to you, and in losing her lover.
+
+She adores her splendid babies, but she is still a woman and a
+wife,--though you seem to ignore that she is anything but a mother.
+
+Right about face, Mr. Gordon, and become the lover you were, and
+jealousy will be driven from your threshold.
+
+It is your own lack of thoughtfulness, your own tactless and tasteless
+methods with your wife, which have caused the change in her manner. She
+is not jealous, she is only lonely, heart-hungry, disillusioned.
+
+You are less noble, less considerate, less tender, less sympathetic
+than she believed. For the man to whom these adjectives can be applied
+will guard, love, and cherish the wife of his youth, and the mother of
+his children, before all other considerations; and he will understand
+how sensitive a fading wife may be, and not confound that sensitiveness
+with ignoble jealousy.
+
+It is you, Charles Gordon, who must cure your wife of nerves, hysteria,
+and incipient jealousy, not I.
+
+
+
+
+To Mrs. Clarence St. Claire
+
+_Concerning Her Husband_
+
+
+I am sorry that your matrimonial barque meets so many rough winds while
+hardly out of Honeymoon Bay.
+
+Clarence and you seemed so deeply in love when I last saw you, six
+months after your wedding, that I had hoped all might go well with you.
+
+I knew the disposition of Clarence to be tainted with jealousy, but
+hoped you would be able to eradicate it from his nature.
+
+You know his poor mother suffered agonies from the infidelities of his
+father before Clarence was born. She had married a handsome foreigner
+with whom she was desperately enamoured, while he cared only for the
+fortune she brought him.
+
+While still in the full light of the honeymoon he began to indulge in
+flirtations and amours, and poor Clarence, during the important prenatal
+period of life, received the mark of suspicion and the tendency to
+hypersensitiveness which then dominated the mother.
+
+By the time Elise was born she had passed through the whole process, and
+was passive and indifferent.
+
+I cannot help a sensation of amusement, even in face of the condition
+you describe (which is little short of tragic), as I recall the letter
+Clarence wrote begging me to try and prevent, by fair means or foul, his
+sister's marriage to old Mr. Volney.
+
+That was two years before you and Clarence were married.
+
+Elise, we all know, wedded for the money and position Mr. Volney gave,
+in return for her young beauty.
+
+Clarence and you were ideal lovers, seeing nothing in the world outside
+of your own selves.
+
+Yet Elise is quite contented, and Mr. Volney uses what little brain he
+has left to exult over his possession of such a beautiful young wife.
+
+Elise upholds his dignity and flatters him into a belief that he is a
+great philanthropist and a social power, and in this way she has the
+handling of his millions, which is her idea of happiness. She travels,
+entertains, and poses for photographs and paintings in imported gowns,
+and there is no rumour of discontent or divorce.
+
+Meanwhile, Clarence, who was so opposed to her marriage because it was
+loveless, is making a mess of his own love-match, through his jealousy.
+
+You, who knew him to be insanely jealous as a lover, and who seemed to
+be flattered with what you thought a proof of his devotion, appeal to me
+now to know what to do with the husband who is destroying your love and
+your happiness! Surely, if Elise knew of this she might well say, "He
+laughs best who laughs last."
+
+I know that you were absorbed in Clarence for the first year of your
+married life, and that you gave no least cause for any jealousy, and I
+know, as you say, that even then he was often morbid and unhappy over
+nothing at all.
+
+He was jealous even of girl friends and relatives, and if you attended a
+matinee with one of them, he sulked the whole evening.
+
+This was little more than he did as a lover, and you should have begun
+in those days to reason him out of such moods.
+
+You imagined then it was his mad love for you which caused his
+unreasonable jealousy.
+
+But jealousy is self-love, and selfishness lies at the root of such
+conditions of mind as his.
+
+A woman should say to a man who sulks or goes into tantrums when she
+pays courteous attentions to relatives or acquaintances, "You are
+lowering my ideal of you--I cannot love a man who will indulge such
+unworthy moods. You insult my womanhood and doubt my principles by your
+suspicions; you intimate that I have neither truth, or judgment, or
+pride. You must conquer yourself, and learn to trust me and to believe
+in me, or I must decide I am no woman for you to take as a life
+companion." A man should take the same course toward a jealous
+sweetheart or wife.
+
+A few quiet but firm assertions of this nature, when you were being
+wooed, would have given Clarence an idea that he could lose you, and
+that he was making himself ridiculous in your eyes. Instead, you boasted
+to your friends how wildly infatuated he was, and Clarence took new
+pride in his own blemish of character.
+
+Now that you have to live day, and night, and week, and month, and year,
+with this trait, it seems a less romantic phase of devotion, I fancy.
+But you are not wise to grow reckless and ignore the wishes of your
+husband in all ways, because he is unreasonable. "Since he is so
+absolutely impossible to please," you say, "I may as well please myself.
+I have decided to take some of the liberties so many of my acquaintances
+do, and enjoy life outside my home if I cannot enjoy it within."
+
+Then you proceed to tell me how more than half your associates drive,
+lunch, and dine with men acquaintances, and how old-fashioned they
+consider your scruples. And you tell me that, despite your rectitude,
+Clarence insults you almost daily by his unreasoning jealousy of men,
+women, and even children.
+
+"I have about made up my mind to be less prudish and enjoy myself, as I
+am sure Clarence cannot be any more jealous than he is," you say.
+
+Now since you have asked my advice in the matter, I can only urge you to
+reconsider this last determination.
+
+So long as you are, according to law and in the eyes of the world, the
+wife of a man, you cannot escape comment if you are frequently seen in
+public places alone with another.
+
+Were you to look into the hearts of other men who ask you to dine,
+drive, or lunch alone with them, you would find a feeling of increased
+respect when you decline, although they may show only disappointment on
+the surface. I know that many wives of unblemished reputation accept
+courtesies of this kind from masculine friends, and I of course
+understand that circumstances may arise which make an occasional
+acceptance proper.
+
+But the fewer such occasions, the better and the safer for the married
+woman. The man who is perfectly willing his wife should appear
+frequently in public with other men does not fully appreciate the
+dignity of her position or his own, or else he has lost his love for
+her.
+
+The fact that your husband is jealous without reason is no excuse for
+giving him reason. The moment men know that a husband is inclined to
+jealousy, he falls in their estimation, and they are seized with a
+desire to aggravate him, while they sympathize with the wife.
+
+The sympathetic friend of the abused wife is a dangerous companion for
+her. He may mean to be platonic and kind, but almost invariably he
+becomes sentimental and unsafe.
+
+Once in a thousand times the absolutely happy wife of a husband she
+respects as well as loves can enjoy a platonic friendship with a man who
+respects her, and himself, and her husband. But even that situation is
+liable to prove insecure, if they are much together, owing to the
+selfishness and weakness of human nature when the barriers of convention
+are removed.
+
+But the unhappy wife must take no chances with Fate.
+
+She must either decide to accept her lot and bear it with philosophy, or
+escape from it and begin life over, after the courts have given her the
+right to reconstruct her destiny.
+
+You know all that entails. It is not a pleasant process.
+
+If your love for your husband is entirely dead, and you feel that he has
+forfeited all right to your sympathy, pity, or patience, then break the
+fetters and go free. But if you feel that you are not ready for that
+ordeal, and that you must still remain living under the same roof with
+him, and continue to bear his name, then do not join the great army of
+wives who are to be seen in public restaurants and hotels dining
+tete-a-tete with "platonic friends" over emptied glasses.
+
+You can but make trouble for yourself and add to the misery of your
+husband by such a course. In your particular case, I feel that your
+knowledge of the jealous disposition of the man you married renders it
+your duty to bear and forbear, and to try every method of reformation
+before you resort to the very common highway of divorce as an exit from
+your unhappiness.
+
+A woman has no right to complain of the fault in a husband which she
+condoned in a lover. And a man has no right to complain of the fault in
+a wife he condoned in a sweetheart. Yet both may strive to correct that
+fault.
+
+Insist upon having women and men friends who can be received at your
+home in presence of your husband. Make Clarence realize how he belittles
+himself in your estimation by unreasoning jealousy. Give him to
+understand that you want to love him and respect him, and that you have
+no intention of lowering your standard of behaviour, because he is
+constantly expecting you to. Tell him it mortifies you to find greater
+pleasure away from him than in his presence, yet when he insults you
+with his suspicions, and destroys your comfort with his moods, you can
+no longer think of him as your girlhood's ideal.
+
+Ask him to try, for your sake, to use more common sense and self-control
+in this matter, and to help you to restore the happiness which seems
+flying from your wedded lives.
+
+Do nothing to aggravate or irritate him, but do not give up your friends
+of either sex; this is but to increase his inclination to petty tyranny,
+while it will in no sense lessen his jealousy.
+
+And when you are alone, endeavour to think of him always as sensible,
+reasonable, and kind.
+
+By your mental picture you can help to cure him of the blight he
+received before his birth. It is the task set many a wife, to counteract
+the errors and neglect of mothers.
+
+Look to the Divine source for help in your work, and remember the lovely
+qualities Clarence possesses when he is not under the ban of this
+prenatal mark.
+
+Love him out into the light if you can--and I believe you can if you are
+not too soon discouraged.
+
+It is a nobler effort to try and create in your husband the ideal you
+have in your mind, than to go seeking him elsewhere.
+
+Be patient and wait awhile. Such love as you and Clarence felt in your
+courtship and early marriage cannot so soon have died. It is only
+sleeping, and suffering from a nightmare. Awaken it to life and reality
+and happiness.
+
+
+
+
+To Young Mrs. Duncan
+
+_Regarding Mothers-in-Law_
+
+
+And so the serpent has appeared in your Eden, attired in widow's weeds,
+and talking the usual jargon of "devoted mother love." I do not like to
+say I told you so, but you must remember our rather spirited discussion
+of this very serpent, when you announced your engagement and said Mr.
+Duncan's mother was to make her home with you after your return from
+abroad.
+
+I had met Mrs. Duncan, and I knew her type all too well. Alfred is her
+only child, and she adores him, naturally, but it is adoration so
+mingled with selfishness and tyranny that it is incapable of considering
+the welfare of its object.
+
+Mrs. Duncan was always jealous of any happiness which came to her son
+through another source than herself. That type of mother love is to be
+encountered every day, and that type of mother believes herself to be
+the most devoted creature on earth; while the fact is, she sits for ever
+in the boudoir of her mentality, gazing at her own reflection. She loves
+her children because they also reflect herself, and is incapable of
+unselfish pleasure in their happiness apart from her.
+
+You will remember I urged you to wait until you could have a home,
+however humble, alone with your husband, and even at the cost of that
+most undesirable condition, a long engagement.
+
+But you assured me with much spirit that you had every confidence in
+your power to win Mrs. Duncan's heart, and to crown her declining years
+with peace and happiness.
+
+As well talk of decking a porcupine with wreaths of flowers, and making
+it a household pet, to coddle and caress.
+
+When I congratulated Mrs. Duncan on her son's engagement to such a
+sweet, bright girl as my cousin, she assumed a martyr expression and
+said, "She hoped he would be happy, even if her own heart must suffer
+the pain of losing an only son."
+
+"But," I urged, "he really adds to your life by bringing you the
+companionship of a lovely daughter. My cousin will, I am sure, prove
+such to you."
+
+"I have no doubt your cousin is a most estimable girl," Madame Duncan
+answered, with dignity, "but I have never yet felt the need of any close
+companion save my son. You, having no children, are excusable for not
+understanding my feelings, now when another claims his thoughts."
+
+"Yet the world is maintained by such occurrences," I replied. "You took
+some mother's son, or you would not have had your own."
+
+With austere self-righteousness Mrs. Duncan corrected me.
+
+"I married an orphan," she said.
+
+"How thoughtful of you," I responded. "But you see it is not lack of
+thought, only an accident of fate, which has prevented my cousin from
+marrying an orphan. There are not enough desirable orphans to keep our
+young women supplied with husbands, you know."
+
+I think Mrs. Duncan suspected me of covert sarcasm, for she changed the
+topic of conversation. But I heard her afterward talking to a bevy of
+women on the sorrow of giving up a child after having reared him to
+manhood's estate, and her listeners all seemed duly sympathetic.
+
+Of course, my dear Ruth, there is an element of sadness in the happiest
+of marriages for the parents of children. I think it is particularly sad
+when a mother gives up a daughter, whose every thought she has shared,
+and whose every pleasure she has planned, and sees her embark upon the
+uncertain ocean of marriage, with a strange pilot at the helm.
+
+The really good and loving mother endears herself to that pilot, and
+loves him and seeks his affection for her daughter's sake. She hides
+her own sorrow in her heart, and does not shadow her daughter's voyage
+by her repining.
+
+The man who is worthy of a good girl's love will understand what it must
+mean to a mother to give her daughter to him, and he will in every way
+seek to recompense her for her loss, by bestowing upon her sympathy,
+courteous attentions, and a son's devotion.
+
+Just so will the girl, who is worthy of being a good man's wife, seek to
+make his mother love her.
+
+I know how you have tried to win Mrs. Duncan's heart. I know your
+amiable, sweet disposition, and your unselfishness and tact, and I know
+how you failed.
+
+I can imagine your feelings when you overheard Mrs. Duncan say to a
+caller that she was going to leave your house and take rooms elsewhere,
+as she could not endure your "billing and cooing."
+
+Do you know, Ruth, that nearly all the trouble between mothers-and
+daughters-in-law is due to vanity and jealousy.
+
+Fifty mothers are friends to their daughters' husbands where one is a
+friend to her son's wife. That is because, wholly unconsciously to
+herself, the mother resents another woman sharing the attention of a man
+she loves. The fact that he is her son, and that the love he gives his
+wife is a wholly different sentiment, does not prevent blind,
+unreasoning jealousy from dominating her nature.
+
+Mrs. Duncan wants to stand always in the centre of the stage, with every
+other woman in the play in the background.
+
+It is a most pathetic situation for a man,--this position between a wife
+and a jealous mother. My heart always aches for the man in the case even
+more than for the woman who is misused.
+
+All young men are reared to think mother-love the most unselfish and
+wonderful devotion on earth, even in the face of facts which so often
+prove it otherwise; and when a son sees his mother unhappy he is
+inclined to make every possible excuse for her, because he feels that to
+take issue against her will put him in a false light before the whole
+established order of society, and that he will beat his head against
+traditions wherever he turns.
+
+So, he ofttimes tries to conciliate the wife he has promised to cherish,
+and to convince her that she may exaggerate matters, and that she may
+even be the aggressor, and then he finds himself standing between two
+raging fires, with no escape save through flames, and over hot fagots,
+which will leave him scarred for life.
+
+Sometimes the wife _is_ in the wrong. Sometimes a man marries a woman
+who is so narrow and so selfish and so jealous that she begrudges the
+husband's mother her son's affection. But I must affirm that, in my
+observation of humanity, I have seen but one such wife, where I have
+seen ten jealous and unreasonable mothers.
+
+And with what pleasure and admiration I recall the few beautiful and
+noble mothers-in-law I have known! I can count them on the fingers of
+one hand without including the thumb. I mean mothers of sons.
+
+There are just four whom I can recall. They really loved their sons, and
+loved whatever and whoever gave those sons happiness.
+
+One mother objected to her son's choice before marriage, and tried
+vainly to convince him that he had made a mistake. But after his
+marriage she took the girl into her heart, made her a companion and
+friend, and when the son began to discover her glaring faults, she told
+him to be patient and wait, and that all would be well. Instead of
+saying, "I told you so," she said, "Your wife is young, and has had no
+wise hand to guide her. You married her for love, and if you exercise
+the love-spirit, and are patient and self-controlled in your treatment
+of her, she will overcome these faults which annoy you."
+
+And day by day she called his attention to the pleasing qualities the
+girl possessed, and by praise, tact, love, and sympathy bridged over
+the threatened chasm.
+
+The couple live happily together to-day, thanks to the mother-in-law.
+Oh, that there were more such mothers of sons!
+
+Be as patient and sweet as you can, dear Ruth, toward Mrs. Duncan; think
+how difficult the situation is for your husband, and say or do nothing
+to make it harder for him. But allow Mrs. Duncan to live by herself,
+and, if need be, bear many privations cheerfully that she may do so, and
+that you may have your own home in peace. Every wife is entitled to
+that, and if she has made every possible effort which love and tact can
+make to cast the seven devils of jealousy out of her mother-in-law, and
+they still remain, it is for the general welfare that two separate
+households exist.
+
+When a son has done all he can in reason to make his mother happy, save
+to turn against the wife he has promised to cherish, he is a cad and a
+weakling if he does the latter. He must learn that it is a larger duty
+to be a just man than to be an obedient son.
+
+I am sure Mr. Duncan will have the character and judgment to do what is
+right in this matter.
+
+
+
+
+To a Young Man
+
+_Ambitious for Literary Honours_
+
+
+Your achievements in college, where you distinguished yourself in
+rhetoric and literature, would justify you in thinking seriously of a
+career as an author.
+
+And the fact that your father wishes you to take charge of his brokerage
+business, and to relinquish your literary aspirations, should not deter
+you from carrying out your ambitions.
+
+Prom your mother you inherit a mind and temperament which wholly unfit
+you for the pursuits your father follows and enjoys. You are no more
+suited to make a successful broker than he is fitted to write an Iliad.
+
+Try and make him understand this, and try and convince him that to
+yield to his wishes in this matter, means the sacrifice of your tastes,
+the waste of your talents, and the destruction of your happiness.
+
+If he cannot be convinced by your consistent and respectful arguments,
+then you must quietly, but firmly, refuse to accept a career distasteful
+to you.
+
+No parent has a right to drive a child into so undesirable a path for
+life as this would prove to one of your nature.
+
+Your father would think the horticulturist insane, who took a delicate
+fern and planted it in arid soil, on a hilltop, far from shade, and
+expected it to thrive and bear blossoms like the cactus.
+
+Yet this would be no more unreasonable, than to expect a son of your
+temperament and inclinations to be happy and successful in Wall Street.
+
+It is a curious study to watch parents, and to observe their utter lack
+of knowledge regarding a child's nature and capabilities; and to find
+them not only ignorant in those important matters, but unwilling to be
+enlightened.
+
+You say it makes your father angry to have any one refer to your
+literary talents.
+
+I remember when your father bred race-horses, and how proud he was that
+a two-year-old colt showed traits and points noticeably like its
+high-priced dam.
+
+He chose for your mother, a woman of rare mind, and of poetic taste, and
+why should he not be proud and glad that his son resembles her? When
+will fathers learn that sons are more frequently like their mothers, and
+daughters like their fathers, than otherwise?
+
+The temporary dissatisfaction of your father is not so sad to
+contemplate as your own lifelong disappointment if you accede to his
+wishes in this matter.
+
+Each individual has a right to choose his own career in life, so long as
+that career is respectable and bodes no evil to humanity.
+
+If, as your father threatens, he refuses to give you support while you
+are exploring the field of literature, you should feel grateful to him
+for this unintentional incentive to success.
+
+I do not agree with those who consider the necessity to earn money a
+misfortune to genius.
+
+I believe the greatest works of art given to the world have been brought
+to light through necessity.
+
+The artistic temperament is almost invariably combined with a propensity
+to dream, and to float upon the clouds of imagination.
+
+The ranks of wealth and comfort are full of talented and accomplished
+people who "never are, but always to be" great.
+
+One great man in a score may have been reared in affluence, but I doubt
+if the statistics would show so large a percentage.
+
+There are many hills which contain valuable ore, but if the owner sits
+in ease upon these elevations, and gazes at the sunsets, he does not
+find the ore. If he is a poor man, and takes his pick and _digs_, he
+finds his fortune.
+
+At first he may cast out only loose earth and stones, but by this very
+necessity to find valuables, he continues to search until the ore is
+reached.
+
+Were you to remain at home and enjoy all the benefits of your father's
+wealth, I doubt if you would have the persistence to dig down into the
+mine you possess within you.
+
+You would sit on the hilltop and dream.
+
+If you are forced to write to live, you may cast up some rubbish from
+the surface; yet by the continual digging you will reveal all that lies
+below.
+
+Regarding the style you speak of adopting, let your feeling come
+_first_, your style of expressing that feeling _second_. Say nothing
+merely to exhibit your style--and hold back some strong feelings until
+you can give them the best expression.
+
+As to the methods of getting your work before the public and the
+"influence" you need, I can only assure you that unless you write with
+purpose, and power, and passionate enjoyment of your art, forgetful of
+all things save your desire to express yourself, no influence on earth
+can do more than give you a page in a magazine, or a column in a
+newspaper for an occasion or two. And if you do write under those
+conditions, you will need no influence: for it is just such writing the
+world wants; and the editors and publishers will be forced to read you,
+whether they are inclined to or not.
+
+Christopher Columbus found his continent because he was so determined,
+so persistent, so certain that unknown lands awaited him.
+
+It made no difference who told him that all the earth had been
+discovered, and that he would never be able to succeed in his wild
+venture. His purpose was too strong to be influenced by the doubts of
+others.
+
+It has always seemed to me that God would have made a continent to
+reward such a search, had it not already existed.
+
+Unless you set forth on the sea of literature, with the spirit of a
+Columbus in your soul, you may as well give up the idea of finding the
+Port of Glory. If you do set forth with that spirit, you need ask no
+mortal influence.
+
+God is the only influence genius needs.
+
+Perseverance the only method.
+
+To find the way to success alone, is the test of talent.
+
+Some influential author might give you the entree once to a magazine.
+But editors and publishers are men of purely business instincts, and
+they will not accept work on the recommendation of any third party,
+which they think their public will not like. Their constant effort is to
+find what that public _does like_, and the unknown author has an equal
+advantage with the genius, if he sends such material.
+
+An author once told me that he "trapped" twenty manuscripts and sent
+them out to editors, and all came back unread, as his "trap" proved.
+
+Since he sent them forth with such doubts in his mind, it is no wonder
+his trap succeeded and his manuscripts failed.
+
+No great literary fire of purpose could be in the mind of a man who
+spent thought and time on such a plot to trick an editor. And because
+there was no great flame, the inanimate manuscripts were returned
+unread. For even a package of paper sends out its "aura," and invites or
+repels attention.
+
+If you are discouraged by the people who tell you that "everything has
+been written," and that you can only be a faint echo of greater souls,
+then you do not deserve success. I have no doubt the croakers of that
+day told Shakespeare the same.
+
+It seems that Shakespeare did take many old themes and other people's
+plots and ideas to re-create in his own way. And what a way! Surely he
+who best uses an idea is most entitled to the credit.
+
+There is nothing new under the sun, but there is always the new
+audience. For the majestic old poem of Spring, bound over in new covers
+of green, God creates fresh, eager young eyes and hearts each year. And
+not yet has he said to the year, "Do not attempt another spring--there
+have been so many before, you can but repeat their beauties." Then why
+should any mortal say to the poet or the author, "Do not try to
+write--it has all been said before."
+
+Proceed, my young friend, and write what is in your heart. Nothing quite
+the same was ever in any heart before, and yet the greater part of it
+has been in all hearts, and will be in all hearts, so long as the world
+lasts.
+
+Remember that when you write from the heart, it will go to the hearts of
+your readers: and when you write from your head it will go no lower than
+the head.
+
+And if the critics score or ridicule you, consider yourself on the path
+to success.
+
+If you have a message for the world, nothing and nobody can prevent you
+from delivering it.
+
+He only fails who has nothing to say.
+
+
+
+
+To Mrs. McAllister
+
+_Concerning Her Little Girl_
+
+
+How strange it seems that your daughter is ten years old.
+
+It is such a brief hour since you wrote me you were eighteen and had
+entered Vassar. Having no children of my own to stand as milestones on
+life's highway, and keeping a very young heart in my breast all these
+years, it seems at times little less than impertinent in the children I
+have known to develop so rapidly into matrons and fathers.
+
+I am glad for you that the doctor has reached the desirable goal where
+he can rest from his laborious profession for two years, and take that
+journey abroad you have so long contemplated. And I am glad that you
+feel the satisfaction you say you do, in never having left him alone
+for a whole season as you once thought of doing.
+
+A satisfied conscience is a better comrade to journey along beside, than
+a remembered pleasure.
+
+But now about Genevieve.
+
+You tell me she is to be left with your sister, and that she will, for
+the first time, attend the public school.
+
+You are right in thinking this will make her more American in spirit
+than an education gained through home teaching or private schools.
+
+The girl who attends private schools only, is almost invariably
+inoculated with the serum of aristocracy.
+
+She believes herself a little higher order of being than the children
+who attend public schools, and it requires continual association with
+people of broad common sense to counteract this influence. I know you
+and the doctor have exerted this influence, but your sister might not
+realize the necessity of making a special effort in that direction.
+
+Then, too, since the fathers or grandfathers of our most conspicuous
+social leaders were self-made and self-taught, and since our American
+society is composed of so many varied types of humanity, it is well for
+a young girl to come in contact with all classes while she is yet a
+child, that she may understand humanity as she is sure to encounter it
+later. Yet, as you say, it is indeed a serious thought to know your
+little rosebud of a child is to be tossed into the dust of the public
+schoolroom.
+
+"I do not want the delicate leaves forced into premature blossom or
+blight," you say, and I feel for you, as I read the words.
+
+You remember your own experience as a school-child in the country, and
+you tell me you would fain guard your daughter from hearing or seeing
+much that came to your ears and eyes as a school-child.
+
+But now, my dear Winifred, listen.
+
+It is utterly and absolutely impossible for you to keep Genevieve
+ignorant of _life_, or of the great fundamental principles of life. It
+is utterly useless to undertake to ignore the set impulse in all nature.
+Since God did not ignore it in constructing the universe, parents cannot
+afford to in educating children. The one thing to do is to teach your
+child early to respect and revere the subject, and to regard all things
+pertaining to birth as sacred, never to be lightly discussed. Wherever
+the eyes of an observing child turn, they see something to arouse
+curiosity upon this subject.
+
+All literature (the Bible particularly) contains some reference to sex
+and birth. Unless you stuff the ears of children with cotton, they must
+hear expressions, suggestions, and references, which necessitate
+explanations of the same vital subject. From insects to man, through all
+the various kingdoms, sex laws are the foundation of life.
+
+Why parents have chosen to taboo this important subject, and why they
+surround it with falsehood and subterfuge, and suggest that it is
+unclean or vulgar, has always puzzled me.
+
+Inconceivable harm, lifelong disaster, has befallen many a girl and many
+a boy through this mistaken attitude of parents to God's basic law of
+the universe.
+
+Genevieve is only ten. But she is a child with a most inquiring mind,
+and she already indicates a tendency to coquetry. She prefers boys to
+dolls, and evidently finds them more interesting than girls.
+
+The things you would guard her from knowing, she is sure to learn in
+some undesirable and unfortunate manner, unless you prepare her for them
+with loving delicacy and refinement.
+
+My suggestion is that you take a plant, and talk to her about its
+growth. Tell her how it springs from a seed, and hides in the bosom of
+the earth, expanding until it bursts through, and becomes the baby of
+mother earth.
+
+Tell her, too, of the bird life in the egg, and make her realize the
+mother-impulse in all nature. Then say to her that she is a part of it
+all and that she came into life by the same divine law, and that when
+she is older you will explain whatever puzzles her young mind.
+
+Tell her that she was carried under your heart, as the sprout was
+carried in the bosom of mother earth, and that it is a very holy and
+beautiful thing; so holy and so beautiful that the refined and sweet
+people of the world do not talk freely of the subject, but keep it like
+a religion, for those very near to them.
+
+Then say, You will hear other children, who have not been told this by
+their mothers, speak rudely and even jest on this subject. They are to
+be pitied, for not knowing such jests are vulgar, but you must walk away
+from them, and refuse to listen, after telling them your mother has
+explained all you need to know. Impress upon her that she is never to
+discuss the topic with any one else, unless you advise her to do so.
+
+I have known only two mothers who took this method with their children,
+but both succeeded in rearing beautiful and remarkable daughters and
+sons. For the sons were included in the talk by one mother, and they
+were ideal boys and gentlemen--popular with, and respected by their
+comrades, in spite of their delicacy and reserve on subjects jested over
+by other boys.
+
+I am sure that you can protect Genevieve from the soil and shock you
+fear for her, by making her your confidante at this early age, and by
+convincing her of your loving companionship in the future. Under no
+other conditions would I for one day allow a little girl (or a little
+boy for that matter) to attend a public school. Not one parent in a
+thousand realizes the moral dangers surrounding small children who go to
+and from school in country or city places.
+
+Many remember their own precocious education on forbidden topics, yet
+seem to imagine their children will be immune from such experiences.
+
+But until the Creator produces life by some new process, children will
+never be exempt from curiosity regarding the present method, and parents
+may as well realize the fact and become their children's reverent
+instructors, instead of leaving them to be taught God's holiest truths
+by vulgar chance or dreadful design.
+
+Do not imagine that innocence necessitates ignorance.
+
+Your child will be far more innocent minded, if you give her the
+instruction I suggest, than if you leave her to ungoverned imagination
+and unenlightened observation.
+
+Deep in each human entity the sex impulse is planted, and will assert
+itself sooner or later.
+
+Ignorance and curiosity lead often to precocious development of the
+impulse. By proper care on your part, your child's mind may be kept
+normal, innocent, and wholesome.
+
+See to it that you give this important care before you leave.
+
+
+
+
+To Mr. Ray Gilbert
+
+_Attorney at Law, Aged Thirty_
+
+
+My dear Mr. Gilbert:--Your letter followed me across the ocean, and
+chanced to be the first one opened and read in my weighty home mail
+to-day. I have lost all trace of you during the last six years, in that
+wonderful way people can lose sight of one another in a large city. Once
+or twice I heard you had just left some social function as I arrived, or
+was expected just as I was leaving, and once, recently, I saw you across
+the house at a first night, with a very pretty girl at your side. I
+fancy this is the "one woman in the world for you," of whom you speak in
+the letter before me--the letter written the evening before your
+marriage. How good you are to carry out my request made seven years
+ago, and to write me this beautiful letter, after reading over and
+burning your former boyish epistle, returning to me my reply.
+
+It is every man's duty to himself, his bride, and the other woman, to
+destroy all evidences of past infatuations and affections, before he
+enters the new life. It is every woman's duty to do the same--_with a
+reservation_. Since men demand so much more of a wife than a wife
+demands of a husband, a woman is wise to retain any proof in her
+possession that some man has been an honourable suitor for her hand. She
+should make no use of such evidence, unless the unaccepted lover
+indulges in disrespectful comments or revengeful libels, as some men are
+inclined to when the fruit for which they reached is picked by another
+hand.
+
+And it is when the grapes are called sour that the evidence may prove
+effective of their having been thought sweet and desirable.
+
+It is a curious fact that no woman thinks less of a man for his having
+had his vain infatuations, and that all men think less of a woman if she
+has loved without response.
+
+Therefore, it behoves her to destroy no evidence that the other man, not
+herself, was the discarded party.
+
+But woe unto the man who retains old love-letters, or other tokens of
+dead loves and perished desires.
+
+Few men could be guilty of showing or repeating the contents of another
+man's love-letters. Women who are models of virtue and goodness have
+been known to make public the letters written a man in earlier years by
+another object of his affections. I have to my personal knowledge known
+a woman to place before the eyes of a third person, lines written
+evidently in the very heart's blood of a former sweetheart of her
+husband--words the man believed he had destroyed with other letters,
+more than a score of years before. Imagine what the feelings of that
+early sweetheart, now a happy and beloved wife, would be, did she know
+the words written so long ago were spread before cold and critical
+eyes, and discussed by two people who could have no comprehension of the
+conditions and circumstances which led to their expression.
+
+Because I know otherwise tender-hearted and good women are capable of
+such acts, I am glad you have obeyed my wish of seven years ago, and
+that all proofs of your boyish infatuation for an older woman are
+destroyed. You say you have told the girl you love that you once were
+foolishly fond of me, and that I helped you to higher ideals of
+womanhood and life.
+
+That is wise and well, since you found her to be broad and sensible
+enough to share such a confidence. But had she seen your written words
+to me and my reply, it would have been less agreeable to her than to
+hear your own calm recital of the now dead passion.
+
+Words written in a state of high-wrought intensity retain a sort of
+phosphoric luminosity, like certain decaying substances, and even after
+the passage of years, and when the emotions which gave them expression
+are dead and for-gotten, they seem to emit life and feeling.
+
+_Burn your bridges as you walk along the highways of romance to St.
+Benedict's land_.
+
+Since you compliment me by saying I have helped you to higher ideals of
+life, will you allow me to give you a little advice regarding your
+treatment of your wife?
+
+You have every reason to know that I have been a happy and well-loved
+wife of the man of my choice. You know that I have neither sought nor
+accepted the attentions of other men when they crossed the danger-line
+lying between friendship and love.
+
+Therefore it may astonish you when I confess that, at the time you
+temporarily lost your head, I was conscious of an undercurrent of
+feminine vanity at the thought that I was capable of inspiring a young
+and talented man with so sincere a feeling.
+
+A similar experience with an older man would have suggested an insult,
+since older men understand human nature, and realize what a flirtation
+with a married woman means. But your ingenuousness, and your romantic,
+boyish temperament, were, in a measure, an excuse for your folly, and
+made me lenient toward you.
+
+My happy life, my principles and ideals, submerged this sentiment of
+feminine vanity to which I confess, but I knew it was there, and it led
+me to much meditation, then and ever since, upon the matter of woman's
+weakness and folly.
+
+As never before, I was able to understand how a neglected or misused
+wife might mistake this very sentiment of flattered vanity for the
+recognition of an affinity.
+
+Had I been suffering from coldness and indifference at home, how
+acceptable your boyish devotion might have proved to me.
+
+And how easily I would have been persuaded by your blind reasoning that
+we were intended by an all-wise Providence for life companions.
+
+There is no sin a woman so readily forgives as a man's unruly love for
+her, and hundreds of noble-hearted women have been led to regard a
+lawless infatuation as a divine emotion, because they were lonely, and
+neglected, and hungry for affection.
+
+See to it, my dear friend, as the years go by, that your wife needs no
+romance from the outside world to embellish her life with sentiment.
+
+Do not drop into the humdrum ways of many contented husbands, and forget
+to pay the compliment, and cease to act the lover.
+
+Notice the gowns and hats your wife wears, and share her pleasures and
+interests when it is possible.
+
+Not that you should always be together, for separate enjoyments and
+occupations sometimes lend an added zest to life for husband and wife,
+but do not drift apart in all your ideas and interests, as have so many
+married people.
+
+You are the husband of a bright and lovely girl, and if you forget this
+fact after a time, remember there are other Ray Gilberts who may realize
+it, and seek to awaken such an interest in her heart as you sought to
+arouse in mine.
+
+You found the room occupied by its rightful host.
+
+See it that no man finds the room vacant in your wife's heart.
+
+Study the art of keeping your wife interested and interesting.
+
+A woman thrives on love and appreciation. I know a beautiful bride of
+eighty years, who has been the daily adoration of her husband for more
+than half a century.
+
+She has been "infinite in her variety," and he has never failed to
+appreciate and admire.
+
+Devote a portion of each day to talking to your wife about herself.
+
+Then she will not find it a novelty when other men attempt the same
+method of entertainment.
+
+Whatever other matters engross your time and attention, let your wife
+realize that she stands first and foremost in your thoughts and in your
+heart.
+
+Do not forget the delicacies of life, manner, speech, and deportment in
+the intimacy of daily companionship.
+
+Never descend to the vulgar or the commonplace.
+
+One characteristic of men has always puzzled me. No matter how wide has
+been a bachelor's experience with the wives and daughters of other men,
+when he marries it never occurs to him that his wife or daughters could
+meet temptation or know human weakness.
+
+It must be the egotism of the sex.
+
+Each man excuses the susceptibility of the women with whom he has had
+romantic episodes, on the ground of his especial power or charm. And
+when he marries, he believes his society renders all the women of his
+family immune from other attractions.
+
+Do not rely upon the fact that your wife is legally bound to you, and
+therefore need not be wooed by you hereafter.
+
+There are women who are born anew with each dawn, and who must be won
+anew with each day, or the lover loses some precious quality than can
+never be regained.
+
+It will pay you to study your wife as the years pass.
+
+Do not take for granted that you know her to-day, because you knew her
+thoroughly last year.
+
+This is a long letter, but when one writes only once in seven years,
+brevity is not to be expected.
+
+My greeting to you, and may the years be weaver's hands, which shall
+interlace and bind two lives into one complete pattern.
+
+
+
+
+To the Sister of a Great Beauty
+
+
+I am far from laughing, my dear girl, at your assertion that your
+position is little short of tragic.
+
+To be the ordinary sister of an extraordinary beauty, is a position
+which calls for the exercise of all the great virtues in order to be
+borne with dignity, good taste, and serenity.
+
+I remember seeing you and Pansy when you were ten and she twelve years
+of age. I foresaw what lay before you then, and have often wondered how
+you would meet the occasion when you were both "finished," and at home
+under the same roof, and socially launched. It was wise for your mother
+to separate you so early in life, and place you under different
+teachers, and in different schools.
+
+It is difficult for a girl in her late childhood and early teens to use
+philosophy and religion to support her, when she is made a Cinderella by
+unthinking associates and friends, and forgotten and neglected while a
+more attractive sister is lionized.
+
+Had you always walked in the shadow of your handsome sister until
+to-day, I fancy your disposition would have become warped with
+resentment and envy.
+
+And perhaps your feelings for Pansy would have been less affectionate
+than now.
+
+I am glad to have you tell me that Pansy is so modest and unassuming and
+so genuinely solicitous for your happiness.
+
+She must have been particularly fortunate in her environment while at
+school to possess such qualities after knowing as she has known for
+twenty-two years that her beauty is dazzling to the eye of even the
+chance beholder.
+
+There is no greater obstacle to the development of the best qualities
+in a young woman than the possession of such unusual beauty. From her
+cradle she is made to realize its power, and men and women teach her in
+a thousand unconscious ways to be selfish and self-centred. She receives
+attentions, and her acquaintance is sought, with no effort on her part,
+while more gifted and deserving companions are unnoticed. She is made to
+realize that she is one to be served, where less attractive girls are
+taught to "stand and wait."
+
+The love nature of each human being is either developed or stunted by
+neglect during the early years of life, and, as a rule, the beautiful
+woman is incapable of a deep, absorbing, and unselfish love, because she
+has grown up the receiver instead of the giver.
+
+Were you, my dear Sallie, to know the number of great beauties who have
+failed to find happiness in marriage, you would be amazed. But the
+explanation is simple; for man is a being who, however he may worship
+beauty before marriage, worships his own comfort more deeply afterward.
+And it is rare indeed when a famous beauty troubles herself to plan for
+the comfort or happiness of the man she marries. It is the natural
+result of her education to think man made to adore and serve her.
+
+I hope Pansy may keep her loving and lovable qualities, and that she may
+marry before the adoration and admiration of many men become necessary
+to her life. For the beauties' matrimonial barque most often founders on
+the reef of plural lovers.
+
+As for yourself, I can only suggest that you acquire many
+accomplishments, and perfect yourself in music and languages, and that
+you seek for the attainment of all the subtle graces, which are, in the
+long run, more lasting as sources of happiness for a woman than mere
+beauty. It is a peculiarly significant fact that the great passions of
+history have not been inspired by very young or startlingly beautiful
+women, but by those of maturity and mental charms.
+
+Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Aspasia, Petrarch's Laura, had all crossed
+the line between youth and middle life, and there are no authentic
+proofs that any one of the number was a dazzling beauty. Some of the
+world's most alluring women have been absolutely plain.
+
+You are not plain. It is only by comparison that you so regard yourself.
+
+There is much you can do to make yourself more attractive personally.
+You know what Rochefoucauld said: "No woman is in fault for not being
+beautiful at sixteen; any woman is in fault if she is not beautiful at
+forty."
+
+However much it may sound like a platitude, it is a great and eternal
+truth that your mental activities are chiselling your features. By
+keeping yourself concerned with good, gracious, and great thoughts, you
+are shaping your face into a noble beauty minute by minute, and hour by
+hour.
+
+Avoid as much as possible looking at repulsive and ugly objects.
+
+Look at whatever is beautiful and seek for it.
+
+Search for whatever is admirable in nature and human nature, and muse
+upon those things in your moments of solitude.
+
+Cultivate love-thoughts for humanity at large.
+
+Avoid severe criticisms, and develop sympathy and pity in your soul.
+Study the comfort and pleasure of strangers in public places, and
+friends and associates in nearer relations.
+
+Remember always how brief a thing, and ofttimes sad, life is to many,
+and seek to brighten and better it as you pass along.
+
+Meanwhile, take care of your person, study your lines and your features,
+and learn how to dress and how to carry yourself; how to obtain
+"presence," that indescribable charm in woman.
+
+Take daily care of your complexion, which to a woman is of prime
+importance.
+
+Call in the skill of the specialist to help you preserve and beautify
+your skin and hair, just as the dentist and the oculist are to be
+consulted to help you preserve teeth and eyes. Think beauty for mind,
+soul, and body; live it, and believe it is your right.
+
+And just as surely as you pursue this line of conduct for ten years,
+just so surely will you find yourself at thirty far more attractive than
+at twenty, and at forty more lovely than at thirty. Learn to be a
+linguist, and acquire skill upon some one instrument, that you may
+entertain those who care to converse, and give pleasure to those who
+wish to be silent.
+
+You are young, and life with its splendid possibilities is before you.
+There is nothing a woman with youth, will-power, and _love_ may not
+accomplish--even to the convincing of the world that she is beautiful,
+when her mirror may say otherwise.
+
+For enduring and all-encompassing beauty is a composite thing, and
+unless a woman possesses the spiritual and mental portions, the physical
+phase soon loses its attractions for the cultivated eye; while with the
+development of the first two, the third is certain to come.
+
+Begin to-day, my dear girl, to _grow beauty_ which shall make you a
+power and an influence in the world where you move, and which shall
+invite, rather than fear, the approach of time.
+
+
+
+
+To Mrs. White Peak
+
+_One of the Pillars of Respectable Society_
+
+
+Ever since your call and our conversation regarding Sybyl Marchmont, I
+have felt a rising tide of indignation. It has reached the perigee mark
+and must overflow. If it reaches you and gives you a thorough soaking, I
+shall feel satisfied.
+
+I have always known you were only half-developed. There are many such
+people in the world. They serve their purpose and often do much good.
+They miss a great deal of life, but as they rarely know that they miss
+anything, it is a waste of sentiment to pity them.
+
+I have pitied you, nevertheless. I have often wished I could give you
+the vital qualities you lack.
+
+My pity turned to indignation when I heard you express yourself in such
+unqualified terms of condemnation regarding other women who happened to
+be unlike you in temperament.
+
+You say there is a certain line which no well-born and womanly woman can
+pass in thought or feeling or action.
+
+You regard the true women of earth as a higher and rarer order of
+creation than the best of men, and any woman who by action or word
+confesses herself to be quite human in her temperament, you feel is, to
+a certain extent, "unclean and unsexed." You believe the really good
+women of earth are always on a plane above and beyond the physical. When
+any woman falls from her pedestal you despise her.
+
+How dare you, madam, sitting in your cold, white chastity, lay down laws
+of what you consider purity, morality, and cleanliness, for other human
+souls?
+
+How dare you condemn those who do not reach your standard?
+
+What do you know of life, great, palpitating, throbbing, vital life,
+terrible and beautiful life, terrible while passing through the valleys
+of temptation, beautiful upon the heights of self-control?
+
+How dare you assume greater virtue, greater respectability, greater
+fineness of sentiment, than the tempest-tossed, passion-beaten souls,
+about you?
+
+What do you know of real virtue, real strength?
+
+You have been poor, you tell me, in worldly riches, and you have been
+lonely, yet you have never once degraded your womanhood by an "unworthy
+" impulse. Never known a temptation of the senses. Those things
+disgusted you.
+
+You have preferred toil to taking favours from inferiors, and you have
+kept yourself clean in thought, word, and deed, and now you have the
+reward of such virtues--a good home, a husband, and children.
+
+You are a more devoted mother than wife, as you have always dwelt upon a
+lofty white peak of chaste womanhood, from which any descent into the
+earthly realms of life and love was repugnant--so rarely "pure" and high
+your nature.
+
+Yet you have been a dutiful, loyal wife, and you are a devoted mother.
+
+You despise all carnal-minded women, and cannot understand how women
+fall--save that they lack good birth and breeding.
+
+You will aid in a benefit for their reformation, but you do not want to
+see them or to come near them. It makes you ill.
+
+You are to be congratulated on never having added to the evil in the
+world.
+
+But permit me, madam, to tell you some truths about yourself--and the
+large army of "respectable women" you represent.
+
+However "well born" you may be, you are only half-born. The complete
+human being has three sides to his nature--spiritual, mental, physical.
+
+The men and women who are evenly developed on the three sides are few.
+This is sometimes their fault--sometimes their misfortune.
+
+We all pity the human being who is mentally dwarfed. We are sorry for
+the one whose spiritual nature is undeveloped.
+
+But why should the many women who are devoid of the physical qualities
+of human nature presume to lay claim to perfection and to regard the
+normal woman as a suspicious character?
+
+You have a fine, active mind, a highly spiritual nature, but you are
+stunted in strong, physical emotion. You are incapable of it, and pride
+yourself upon the fact.
+
+If that pleases you, well and good.
+
+But how dare you criticize God's _complete human_ beings, who feel the
+great vibrations of the universe, who glow and thrill with that divine
+creative force, who live a thousand lives and die a thousand deaths
+before they learn the glory of self-conquest.
+
+How dare you shrink even from those who fall by the wayside, and call
+your shrinking "purity"!
+
+Let me ask you another question:
+
+How dare you turn away from that girl who went through the door of the
+Magdalene Home you helped establish, with her fatherless child in her
+arms?
+
+She fell from woman's holy estate!
+
+Yes, through mad love for a man--she loved him with her soul, her mind,
+her body. She lacked knowledge, balance, and wisdom; she had only love
+and passion.
+
+And you, madam, how about _your_ children?
+
+They were born of a "dutiful" wife. You descended from your lofty
+altitude unwillingly--only at duty's call. You are so "refined," yet you
+are a loving mother and pose as the highest type of woman.
+
+_God never made in his whole universe of worlds such a "duty" as
+unwilling motherhood_. Motherhood without the call of sex for sex is
+indecent--criminal. You, too, madam, _fell_.
+
+That girl in yonder "home" your "charity" helped establish, who loved
+unwisely, fell. Her fall was through love--yours through a legal
+ceremony.
+
+All the churches, all the religions and the laws of earth, cannot make
+motherhood holy and right without the mutual mental, spiritual, and
+physical union of two beings.
+
+Heaven and earth _both_ must sanction a child's conception to produce a
+"well-born" soul.
+
+There is no greater sin on earth than the creation of a human life
+without complete accord of the creators.
+
+No wonder the world is full of miserable half-born beings, when mothers
+like _you_ claim to be the Madonnas of earth.
+
+No wonder natural, complete, striving souls hide their true natures
+under a false exterior, when women like _you_ rule church and society.
+
+What shame or degradation is there, pray, in being animate with the
+all-pervading impulse which underlies the entire universe? Every planet,
+every tree, every flower, every insect, is the result of sex seeking
+sex, atom calling atom.
+
+The universe _is_ because of the law of sex attraction.
+
+And you, poor, puny, pallid woman, dare decry and despise that law, and
+dare insult God's animate creature!
+
+Know this, madam, there is no strength worth boasting that has not
+conquered weakness. No virtue worth the name that has not conquered
+temptation. No greatness of character that has not overcome unworthy
+impulses.
+
+Enjoy your negative goodness and be glad you are "good."
+
+Morality is acceptable to the world, however it conies; but dare not sit
+in judgment on other human beings fighting battles whose smoke never
+reaches your nostrils, striving for heights of which you never even
+dream, and who meanwhile have missed certain degradations which you seem
+to consider creditable achievements.
+
+Madam, I bid you adieu. That word means "I commend you to God," the God
+who made the two sexes, and intended love to unite them.
+
+May He enlighten you in other lives, if not in this.
+
+
+
+
+To Maria Owens
+
+_A New Woman Contemplating Marriage_
+
+
+Surprise, I am free to confess, was my dominant emotion on reading your
+letter. Marriage and Maria had never associated themselves in my mind,
+fond as I am of alliteration.
+
+Never in the ten years I have known you have I heard you devote ten
+minutes to the subject of any man's good qualities. You always have
+discoursed upon men's faults and vices, and upon their tendency, since
+the beginning of time, to tyrannize over woman. I was unable to
+disprove many of your statements, for I know the weight of argument is
+upon your side, even while I boldly confess my admiration and regard for
+men, as a class, is greater than that for women.
+
+The fact that the world has allowed men such latitude, and such
+license, and made them pay such very small penalties, comparatively
+speaking, for very large offences, causes me to admire their wonderful
+achievements in noble living all the more: and to place the man of
+unblemished reputation and unquestioned probity on a pedestal higher
+than any I could yet ask builded for woman.
+
+It is more difficult to be great before the extended tentacles of the
+self-indulgence octopus than in the face of oppression and danger. When
+the laws of the land and the sentiment of the people permit a man to be
+selfish, licentious, tyrannical, and yet call him great if he
+accomplishes heroic deeds, it proves what intrinsic worth must lie in
+the nature of those who attain the heights of unselfishness and
+benevolence, and martyrdom, asking no reward and often receiving none
+until posterity bestows it.
+
+Those who can take the broad road of selfishness unmolested, and choose
+the narrow path of high endeavour instead, seem to me greater than those
+who overcome mere externals.
+
+Many such men have existed, and the steady, slow, but certain progress
+of the world from barbarism to civilization, from accepted cannibalism
+and slavery to ideals of brotherhood, we owe to them. All new
+discoveries, all greatest achievements are due to men. Woman, I know,
+has been handicapped and oppressed for centuries by superstitions, and
+traditions, and unjust laws; but it is unfair to ignore the bright, and
+see only the dark side of the picture, which the centuries have painted
+for us, on the background of time.
+
+This letter is only a resume of many conversations between you and me,
+and it leads up to the explanation of why I am somewhat dazed and
+stunned by your announcement that marriage is a possible event in your
+near future.
+
+My self-conceit in regard to my knowledge of human nature every now and
+then receives a blow. So soon as I have arrived at a positive conviction
+that I understand any human being thoroughly, and feel that I can safely
+predict what that person will or will not do, I usually meet some such
+bewildering experience as this.
+
+I would have laughed at any one who suggested the possibility of your
+considering a proposition of marriage.
+
+You tell me you are thirty-five years old, and say you have never before
+met the man to whom your thoughts reverted, no matter how you
+endeavoured to occupy yourself with other subjects. You also tell me "he
+is not like other men." These two statements are wonderfully familiar to
+me, indeed they have been confided to me in precisely the same words by
+at least a score of women, young and not so young, who met the
+compelling man. _Maria, I believe you are in love_. Your heart is
+awakened from its stupor, caused by an overdose of intellect. For too
+much intellect is often a drug which deadens the consciousness of a
+woman's heart. But you have been drugged so long that you are still
+under a hazy spell, to judge from that portion of your letter which took
+the form of an inquiry.
+
+You ask my opinion in regard to the point of disagreement between you
+and your semi-fiance. To much that you say I agree. You have carved a
+name and a place for yourself in the world. Your lectures, and your
+books, have made your name familiar to many people. Your lover is
+unknown to the public, a man in the private walks of life. Therefore you
+think if he loves you as he should to become your husband, he ought to
+give up his own name and take yours, or at least add yours to his own.
+You assure me it is merely a matter of habit, that women have
+obliterated themselves on the altar of marriage, and that it is time a
+new order was instituted. You think the hour calls for pioneers to
+establish new boundaries, in a new world where woman will be allowed to
+keep her individuality after marriage. Meantime your lover does not feel
+that you really love him, when you ask him to take this somewhat radical
+step for your sake, or for the sake of all women, as you put it.
+
+And there you both stand, with only this ridiculous barrier between you
+and happiness.
+
+You are still influenced by the intellectual drug, and it hinders your
+heart from following out its best impulses. You have not yet learned
+more than the A B C of love, or you would know that the greatest
+happiness in loving lies in sacrifice. To take and not give, to gain
+something and give up nothing, is not loving. Now I think I hear you
+saying, "But why should not my lover give this proof of devotion as well
+as I? Why should not he be ready to sacrifice a tradition, and a name,
+to please me? Why am I more unloving, or selfish, than he, to refuse to
+give up my name?"
+
+My answer follows.
+
+Any woman who asks a man to give up his name and take hers (unless some
+great legal matter which involves the property rights of others hangs on
+so doing) asks him to make himself ridiculous in the eyes of the world.
+She indicates, also, that her family name and her own achievements are
+dearer to her than his. No woman loves a man enough to be happy as his
+wife, if he is not dearer to her than any mere personal success, however
+great.
+
+The man who asks a woman to take his name obeys a tradition and a
+custom, to be sure, and the woman who accepts it does not display any
+especially heroic trait. Therefore, what you demand of your lover is a
+far greater proof of devotion than what he asks of you. No woman who
+fully understood the meaning of love could ask this of her future
+husband. If he occupied the place in her life which a husband should, no
+matter what were her personal attainments, she would glory in adding his
+name to her own, and in having its shelter to hide under at times from
+the glare of publicity.
+
+Should you choose to keep your name Maria Owens with no addition, for
+your lectures and your books, it is quite probable your husband would
+not object. And again, if your achievements are worth the thought you
+give them in this matter, they are great enough to endure even should
+you add the name of Chester to that of Owens. But certainly, if you love
+the man you think of marrying, you will be happy in the thought of
+wearing his name legally and socially in every-day life, and the sight
+of a card engraved, "Mrs. Rupert Chester," will give your heart a
+sweeter thrill than it has ever known in connection with the newspaper
+notices of Maria Owens.
+
+Unless you can arouse your heart to such an understanding of love, you
+are not yet acquainted with the little god. If your lover consents to
+the sacrifice you have demanded, he will indicate a weakness of
+character which augurs ill for the future: and if you insist upon the
+sacrifice, you will establish a selfish precedent which can only make
+you a tyrant in your own domain, and at the same time belittle your
+husband in the public eye.
+
+However proud and happy you may be in the thought of noble achievements
+of your own, you must realize that there are many brutal and painful
+phases to a public career for a woman. These phases do not exist to any
+such degree for a man. I do not believe it is the result of tradition or
+habit, but of sex and temperament, that this difference exists, and that
+the shelter of a man's name means more to woman than any shelter to be
+found in her own, and that the sacrifice of her own name means less to
+her than the sacrifice of his means to him. Unless you can reach this
+same conclusion, do not marry--for you do not love.
+
+
+
+
+To Mrs. St. Claire
+
+_The Young Divorcee_
+
+
+And so you have joined the increasing army of the divorcees.
+
+It is worse than useless to discuss again the causes which led to this
+situation, and now that the law of the land has made you a free woman,
+the one thing for you to consider is your future, and to formulate to
+some degree a code of conduct for your guidance.
+
+You are in the prime of beautiful womanhood, pleasing to the eye, and
+agreeable to the mind. Women will regard you with more or less mental
+reservation, and men will seek you at every opportunity.
+
+Some witty creature has said, "A little widow is a dangerous thing."
+
+It might be added, "A grass widow whets the appetites of bovines".
+
+You will find yourself at a loss to choose when an escort is needed, so
+many and persistent will be the applicants for the position.
+
+After having passed through the black waters of an unhappy marriage,
+this sudden freedom and return to the privileges of girlhood will be
+liable to affect you like the glare of sunlight after confinement in a
+dark room.
+
+You will be blinded for a time. It would be well for you to walk slowly,
+and to use a cane of common sense, and even to feel your way with the
+outstretched hands of discretion, until you become accustomed to the
+light.
+
+To fall and scar yourself now, would be a disaster.
+
+It is a curious fact that a woman who has been unhappy with one man
+usually finds many others ready to give her the opportunity for a
+repetition of her experience. And it is equally curious that one unhappy
+marriage frequently leads to another.
+
+A disastrous rencontre with Hymen seems to destroy a woman's finer
+intuitions. If you feel that you must marry again, go slowly, and wait
+until the bruised tendrils of your heart have healed and are rooted in
+healthy soil. Do not let them twine about any sort of a dead tree or
+frail reed. Run no chance of a second sorrow.
+
+One divorce always contains elements of tragedy. A second becomes a
+farce.
+
+You tell me that you and your former husband entertain the kindest
+feeling for each other. You have seen him and talked with him on several
+occasions, and you regard him as a friend. You say all love and
+sentiment perished long before your separation, and that to continue as
+his wife was to die a thousand deaths daily.
+
+You tell me that your own higher development demanded this separation. I
+know such situations do exist in the world of men and women, and that to
+submit to them is a crime. Yet I also know that this idea of
+"development" is used often as a cloak for all sorts of selfish impulses
+and moods.
+
+Many men and women to-day seem to forget that certain other objects
+besides happiness enter into self-development.
+
+It is not only the pilot who deserts the ship and swims ashore who saves
+his life. The one who keeps his hand on the wheel, and his eye on the
+lighthouse, he, too, sometimes saves his own life, as well as saves the
+ship.
+
+But since to jump overboard was the only way to save your own life, now
+that you are ashore, and dry, and comfortable, your first consideration
+should be to avoid falling into mires and pits as you go along.
+
+Though romance died out of your marriage, do not let it die out of your
+heart. It is commendable that you feel no bitterness or resentment
+toward your husband. But do not carry your kindly feelings toward him to
+the extent of frequent association and comradeship.
+
+Outside of criminal situations, life offers no more ghastly and
+unpleasant picture than that of dead passion galvanized into a semblance
+of friendship, and going about the world devoid of the strong elements
+of either sentiment.
+
+There is something radically wrong with a woman's ideals when she does
+not feel an instinctive unwillingness to be thrown with the man from
+whom she has been divorced.
+
+There is something akin to degeneracy in the man or woman who can
+contemplate without shrinking the intimate encounter of legally parted
+husbands or wives.
+
+The softening of the human brain is a terrible malady.
+
+Quite as terrible is the hardening of the human heart.
+
+The loss of happiness is deemed a tragedy. But far greater is the
+tragedy when the illusive charm of romance departs, and love and
+marriage are reduced to the commonplace. Unless you find the man who
+carries your whole nature by storm, and who makes you feel that life
+without him will be insupportable, do not be led again to the altar of
+marriage.
+
+Life has many avenues for a bright and charming woman which lead to
+satisfaction and peace, if not to happiness.
+
+If you desire to be a picturesque figure in the world, remember that the
+divorced woman who never marries again is far more so than she who has
+taken the names of two living men.
+
+And remember how much there is in life to do for other people, how much
+there is to achieve, and how much there is to enjoy, for the woman who
+has eyes wherewith to see, and ears with which to hear.
+
+Life is a privilege, even to the unhappy. It allows them the opportunity
+to display the great qualities which God implanted in every soul, and to
+give the world higher examples of character.
+
+He who leaves such an example to the world earns happiness for eternity.
+
+
+
+
+To Miss Jessie Harcourt
+
+_Regarding Her Marriage with a Poor Young Man_
+
+
+And so there is trouble in the house of Harcourt, my dear Jessie. You
+want to marry your intellectual young lover, who has only his pen
+between him and poverty, and your cruel father, who owns the town, says
+it is an act of madness on your part, and of presumption on his.
+
+And you are thinking of going to the nearest clergyman and defying
+parental authority.
+
+You have even looked at rooms where you believe you and Ernest could be
+ideally happy. And you want me to act as matron-of-honour at that very
+informal little wedding.
+
+Now, my dear girl, before you take this important step, give the matter
+careful study.
+
+Your impulses are beautiful, and your ideal natural and lovely. God
+intended men and women to choose their mates in this very way, with no
+consideration of a worldly nature to mar their happiness.
+
+But civilized young ladies are a far call from God's primitive woman.
+You have lived for twenty-three years in the lap of modern luxury. Your
+father prides himself upon the fact that, although your mother died when
+you were very young, he has carefully shielded you from everything which
+could cast a shadow upon your name or nature. Your lover is fascinated
+with your absolute purity and innocence. Yet he does not realize that a
+young woman who has so long "sat in the lap of Luxury," is unfit to be a
+poor man's wife.
+
+Some girl who might know much more than you of the dark and vulgar side
+of life, would make him a better companion if he could love her enough
+to ask her hand in marriage.
+
+The girl who has received the addresses of this fascinating old fellow
+"Luxury," never quite forgets him, or ceases to bemoan him if she
+throws him over for a poor man.
+
+To _look_ at two rooms and a bath is one thing, to _live_ in them
+another, after having all your life occupied a suite which a queen might
+envy, with retinues of servitors at call.
+
+You tell me you could die for your lover.
+
+But can you bathe from a wash-bowl and pitcher, and can you take your
+meals at cheap restaurants, and make coffee and toast on an oil-stove or
+a chafing-dish?
+
+Can you wear cheap clothing and ride in trolleys, and economize on
+laundry bills to prove your love for this man?
+
+You never have known one single hardship in your life; you never have
+faced poverty, or even experienced the ordinary economies of well-to-do
+people.
+
+You are an only daughter of wealth--_American wealth_. That sentence
+conveys a world of meaning. _It means that you are spoiled for anything
+but comfort in this life_.
+
+For a few weeks you might believe yourself in a fairy-land of romance
+if you married your lover and went to live in the two rooms. But at the
+end of that period you would begin to realize that you were in a very
+actual land of poverty and discomfort.
+
+Discomfort is relative. Those rooms to the shop-girl who had toiled for
+years, and lived in a fourth-flight-back tenement, would represent
+luxury. To you, after a few months, they would mean absolute penury.
+
+You would begin to miss your beautiful home, and your maids, and your
+carriages. Your husband would know you were missing them, and he would
+be miserable. Unless your father came to your rescue, your dream of
+romantic love would end in a nightmare of regret and sorrow.
+
+Your father knows you,--the creature of refined tastes and luxurious
+habits that he has made you,--and your lover does not. Neither do you
+know yourself.
+
+It requires a woman in ten thousand, one possessed of absolute heroism,
+like the old martyrs who sang at the stake while dying, to do what you
+contemplate, and to be happy in the doing.
+
+Nothing like a life of self-indulgence disintegrates great qualities.
+You are romantically and feverishly in love with a handsome and gifted
+young man. But do not rush into a marriage with him until you can bring
+your father to settle a competence upon you, or until your lover has
+spanned the abyss of poverty with a bridge of comfort. You have had no
+training in self-denial or self-dependence. The altar is a bad place to
+begin your first lesson.
+
+Wait awhile. I know my advice seems worldly and cold, but it is the
+result of wide observation.
+
+If you cannot sit in your gold and white boudoir, and be true to Ernest
+while he battles a few more years with destiny, then you could not
+remain loyal in thought while you held your numb fingers over a chilly
+radiator in an uncomfortable flat, or omitted dessert from your dinner
+menu to cut down expenses.
+
+Your brain-cells have been developed in opulence.
+
+You could not train your mind to inexorable economy, even at the command
+of Cupid.
+
+Take the advice of a woman of the world, my dear girl, and do not
+attempt the impossible and so spoil two lives.
+
+Again I say, wait awhile.
+
+There are girls who could be perfectly happy in the position you picture
+for yourself with Ernest, but not you.
+
+Better hide your ideal in your heart than shatter it on the unswept
+hearthstone of the commonplace.
+
+Better be in your lover's life the unattained joy, than ruin his
+happiness by discontent.
+
+It is less of a tragedy for a man to hear a woman say "I cannot go with
+you," than to hear her say "I cannot stay with you."
+
+
+
+
+To Miss Jane Carter
+
+_Of the W.C.T.U._
+
+
+And so, my dear Jane, I have fallen from my pedestal, in your
+estimation. Yet, having carefully regarded myself in the mirror, and
+finding no discolorations, and feeling no wounds or contusions, I think
+my pedestal must have been very near the earth, else I would be
+conscious of some bruises.
+
+And now, Jane, to be frank, I am very glad to be off my perch.
+
+I do not want to dwell upon a pedestal.
+
+It necessitates a monotonous life, and it is an unsocial position.
+
+I prefer to walk on the earth, among my fellow creatures.
+
+You were greatly shocked, I saw, when I told my little Russian guest
+that she might light her cigarette in my boudoir. Your sudden departure
+told its own story, and your letter was no surprise. But I am glad you
+wrote me so frankly, as it gives me the opportunity to be equally frank.
+
+There is nothing more beneficial, in true friendship, than a free
+exchange of honest criticisms.
+
+You tell me that I lowered my standard by lending countenance to a
+pernicious and unladylike habit. You felt I owed it to myself, as a good
+woman, and to my home, as a respectable house, to show my unswerving
+principles in this matter, and to indicate my disapproval of a
+disgusting vice, which is growing in our midst.
+
+Life is too short, my dear Jane, in which to achieve all our ideals, and
+to arrive at all our goals.
+
+I have learned the futility of attempting to reform the whole world in
+one day. And I have also learned that there are more roads than one, to
+all destinations.
+
+Miss Ordosky is the daughter of a dear old friend of my youth, who
+married a Russian nobleman with more titles than dollars.
+
+Her parents are dead, and Wanda has come to her mother's native land, to
+teach her father's language. She has come with all her Russian habits
+and ideas accented by her mother's American indifference to public
+opinion. The girl is young, lovely, and wholly dependent upon herself
+for a livelihood. I invited her to be my guest for two months, before
+establishing herself in her business, with the hope of helping her to
+adapt herself somewhat to American ideas and customs.
+
+I could never hope for such a result, had I antagonized her the first
+day under my roof by an austere attitude toward a habit which I knew she
+had been reared to think proper.
+
+I do not like to see a woman smoke, and I regret as much as you do the
+increasing prevalence of the vice in America.
+
+Like almost every schoolgirl, I had my day of thinking a surreptitious,
+cigarette was wonderfully cunning.
+
+That day passed, like the measles and the whooping-cough, and left me
+immune. I have never seen a woman so beautiful and alluring that she was
+not less charming when she put a cigarette to her lips. I am confident
+the habit vitiates the blood, injures the digestion, and renders the
+breath offensive. I have known many American men who taught their wives
+to smoke; and I do not know _one_ who has not lived to regret it, when
+the cigarette he fancied would be an occasional luxury became a
+necessity.
+
+A woman who expects ever to bring children into the world, is little
+better than a criminal to form such a habit: for, argue as we may for
+one moral code for both sexes, we cannot change nature's law, which
+imposes the greater responsibility upon the mother of the unborn child;
+the child she carries so many months beneath her heart, giving it hour
+by hour the impression of her mental and physical conditions.
+
+Fathers ought not to smoke or indulge in other bad habits.
+
+_Mothers must not_.
+
+I hope in time to discuss these topics with Wanda, and to make an
+impression upon her mind by my arguments.
+
+But your methods and mine, dear Jane, differ widely. And, begging your
+pardon, I believe mine accomplish more good for a larger number of human
+beings than yours.
+
+And, added to that fact, I get more happiness for myself out of life.
+
+Miss Ordosky would have managed to smoke her cigarette, however rigid
+had I been in expressing my principles. And she would have found some
+excuse to shorten her visit under my roof, and then where would be my
+opportunity to influence her?
+
+As it is, she puffs her cigarette in my company, listens to my opinions,
+seems to respect my ideas, and is interested in my views of life. We are
+becoming excellent comrades, and this is far more gratifying to me than
+to know that I had antagonized her into a formal acquaintance by my
+aggressive morality. I have an idea that, before my pretty guest
+reaches the time when she will consider wifehood and motherhood as life
+professions, I may convince her from a scientific standpoint that she
+better abandon her cigarettes. And to convince one's mind is far better
+than to drive one to submission.
+
+And now, Jane, has it never occurred to you that you have made some
+mistakes in life by the very methods you are so sorry I did not pursue
+with Miss Ordosky?
+
+Years ago, I recall your surrounding a certain young man with an aureole
+of idealism. Then you were obliged to dethrone him from his pedestal
+because he, too, forsooth, smoked a cigar.
+
+That young man married a woman quite as worthy and good as yourself, and
+he has made the best of husbands and citizens. I know of no man who does
+more good in the world in a quiet way than this same unpedestaled old
+admirer of yours. Whether he still smokes his cigar or not I could not
+say. But as a man, it seems to me, he is quite as worthy and noble a
+citizen, as you are a woman.
+
+I know that you are doing all you can, to spread the gospel of clean
+living abroad in the land, and that your influence is all for a higher
+standard of morality.
+
+But if you live on too high an altitude, in this world, and refuse to
+associate with any one who will not climb up to your plane, you are
+destined to a lonely life, and your sphere of influence is limited. You
+will do far more good by taking your place with other human beings, and
+by gradual, sane efforts leading the thoughts of your associates to turn
+to your wholesome ideas of life. You are making morality unpopular by
+your present aggressive methods. And you are missing many sweet
+friendships and experiences by your insistence that all your friends
+must follow the narrow path you have decided is the only road to good
+behaviour.
+
+Come down from your pedestal, my dear Jane--come and dwell on the earth.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Woman of the World, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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