he spoiled children of the world, whose fate it is to get the
best of everything without regard to their deserts. Others may be warm,
may shiver with cold, may be weary, may be ill, but they must not
complain. The burden of lamentation comes from those who were never too
warm or too cold, never weary or ill, but who tremble lest in some cruel
way they should be forced to suffer, and thus provide against it
beforehand. To these spoiled children the system of things in general
has no other design than to give them comfort in particular. And by some
subtle law of attraction the good things of the world are almost certain
naturally to gravitate toward them. They sleep well; they dine well;
they are petted by everybody; they have no despairs; they never suffer
from other people's mishaps.

A woman who marries one of these spoiled children may be sure of an
opportunity to practise all the feminine virtues. She is certain to have
been very much in love with him, for he was handsome, could dance and
flirt to perfection, and was the very ideal of a charming lover. The
little dash of selfishness in his ante-nuptial imperiousness and tender
tyranny pleased her, for it seemed to be the expression of a more ardent
love than that of every-day men. It depends very much upon her
generosity and largeness of heart whether she soon wakes up to the fact
that she has married a being destitute of sympathy, wholly careless and
ignorant of others' needs and requirements, full of caprices, allowing
every impulse to carry him away, and thoroughly bent on having his own
will and bending everybody about him to his own purposes.
Self-renunciation and absolute devotion and self-sacrifice are natural
to women of a certain quality of intellect and heart, and possess the
most powerful charm to their imagination, provided they can have a dash
of romance or a kindling of sentiment. Hence this form of martyrdom
offers the female sex the pose in which it has sat for its portrait all
the centuries since civilization began, and the picture stands out
impressively against a background we all can recognize. As a school for
heroism nothing can equal marriage with a spoiled child.

But, although probably quite as many instances may be found in one sex
as in the other, the characteristics of a spoiled child are distinctly
feminine, and in no measure belong to robust masculinity. Thus, for a
study, let us take a girl who from her cradle has found everything
subor