that a French milliner need not blush to confess as her handiwork.
She can run up the seams in a dress-skirt with speed that fills the
slower sisters working at her side with sad envy. She puts up
preserves with marvelous dexterity, and can toss together eggs,
butter, sugar and flour, and turn out a cake in less time than an
ordinary woman would consume in creaming the butter and sugar. But it
is an obvious fact that the work of this remarkable woman lacks
"staying power." Her too rapid and long stitches often give way,
allowing between them mortifying glimpses of white under-waist or
skirt to obtrude themselves; in a high wind the trimmings or feathers
are likely to blow loose from the dainty bonnets; her preserves
ferment, and have to be "boiled down," while the cutting of her cake
reveals the truth that under the top-crust are heavy streaks, like a
stratum of igneous formation shot athwart the aqueous. The maker of
gown, hat, preserves, and cake lacks thoroughness. As one irreverent
young man once said after dancing with her--"she is all the time
tumbling to pieces."

Since something must be crowded out, the first and great point is to
determine what this something must be. Certain duties are of prime
importance, others only secondary. One writer says of a woman who had
cultivated the sense of proportion with regard to her work: "We felt
all the while the cheer and gladness and brightness of her presence,
just because she had learned to make this great distinction,--to put
some things first and others second. She had mastered the great secret
of life."

This talk of mine reminds me of a prosy preacher who chose one Sunday
as the text of his sermon, "It is good to be here," and began his
discourse with the announcement, "I shall employ all the time this