self-sacrifice. They are smothered in their own sweetness. They dash
into domesticity with an impetus and abandonment that annihilate
themselves. They sink into their families like a light in a poisonous
well, and are extinguished.

One hears much complaint of the direction and character of female
education. It is dolefully affirmed that young ladies learn how to sing
operas, but not how to keep house,--that they can conjugate Greek verbs,
but cannot make bread,--that they are good for pretty toying, but not
for homely using. Doubtless there is foundation for this remark, or it
would never have been made. But I have been in the East, and the West,
and the North, and the South; I know that I have seen the best society,
and I am sure I have seen very bad, if not the worst; and I never met a
woman whose superior education, whose piano, whose pencil, whose German,
or French, or any school-accomplishments, or even whose novels, clashed
with her domestic duties. I have read of them in books; I did hear of
one once; but I never met one,--not one. I have seen women, through love
of gossip, through indolence, through sheer famine of mental _pabulum_,
leave undone things that ought to be done,--rush to the assembly,
the lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or vegetate in squalid, shabby,
unwholesome homes; but I never saw education run to ruin. So it seems to
me that we are needlessly alarmed in that direction.

But I have seen scores and scores of women leave school, leave their
piano and drawing and fancy-work, and all manner of pretty and pleasant
things, and marry and bury themselves. You hear of them about six times
in ten years, and there is a baby each time. They crawl out of the
farther end of the ten years, sallow and wrinkled and lank,--teeth gone,
hair gone, roses gone, plumpness gone,--freshness, and vivacity, and
sparkle, everything that is dewy, and springing, and spontaneous, gone,