er--the first seat, the softest cushion, the
most protected situation; and she looks for the best of all things as if
naturally consecrated from her birth into the sunshine of life, and as
if the "cold shade" which may do for others were by no means the portion
allotted to her. It is almost impossible to make the spoilt woman
understand the grace or the glory of sacrifice. By rare good fortune she
may sometimes be found to possess an indestructible germ of conscience
which sorrow and necessity can develop into active good; but only
sometimes. The spoilt woman _par excellence_ understands only her own
value, only her own merits and the absolutism of her own requirements;
and sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole class of virtues belonging
to unselfishness are as much unknown to her as is the Decalogue in the
original, or the squaring of the circle.

The spoilt woman as the wife of an unsuccessful husband or the mother of
sickly children is a pitiable spectacle. If it comes to her to be
obliged to sacrifice her usual luxuries, to make an old gown serve when
a new one is desired, to sit up all night watching by the sick bed, to
witness the painful details of illness, perhaps of death, to meet
hardship face to face, and to bend her back to the burden of sorrow, she
is at the first absolutely lost. Not the thing to be done, but her own
discomfort in doing it, is the one master idea--not others' needs, but
her own pain in supplying them, the great grief of the moment. Many are
the hard lessons set us by life and fate, but the hardest of all is that
given to the spoilt woman when she is made to think for others rather
than for herself, and is forced by the exigencies of circumstances to
sacrifice her own ease for the greater necessities of her kind.

All that large part of the perfect woman's nature which expresses itself
in serving is an unknown function to the spoilt woman. She must be
waited on, but she cannot in her turn serve even the one or two she
loves. She is the woman who calls her husband from one end of the room
to the other to put down her cup, rather than reach out her arm and put
it down for herself; who, however weary he may be, will bid him get up
and ring the bell, though it is close to her own hand, and her longest
walk during the day has been from the dining-room to the drawing-room.
It is not that she cannot do these small offices for herself, but that
she likes the feeling of being waited on and atten