contradiction!" you will say, and I cannot deny it; for, with all their
cultivation, the American women have no real intellectual interests, but
only intellectual fads; and while they certainly think a great deal, they
reflect little, or not at all. The inventions and improvements which
have made their household work easy, the wealth that has released them in
such vast numbers from work altogether, has not enlarged them to the
sphere of duties which our Altrurian women share with us, but has left
them, with their quickened intelligences, the prey of the trivialities
which engross the European women, and which have formed the life of the
sex hitherto in every country where women have an economical and social
freedom without the political freedom that can alone give it dignity and
import. They have a great deal of beauty, and they are inconsequently
charming; I need not tell you that they are romantic and heroic, or that
they would go to the stake for a principle, if they could find one, as
willingly as any martyr of the past; but they have not much more
perspective than children, and their reading and their talk about reading
seem not to have broadened their mental horizons beyond the old sunrise
and the old sunset of the kitchen and the parlor.

In fine, the American house as it is, the American household, is what the
American woman makes it and wills it to be, whether she wishes it to be
so or not; for I often find that the American woman wills things that she
in no wise wishes. What the normal New York house is, however, I had
great difficulty in getting Mrs. Makely to tell me, for, as she said
quite frankly, she could not imagine my not knowing. She asked me if I
really wanted her to begin at the beginning, and, when I said that I did,
she took a little more time to laugh at the idea, and then she said, "I
suppose you mean a brown-stone, four-story house in the middle of a
block?"