unicates to them an intellectual irritation which might
almost stand for a mental process. If they have not ideas, they have
notions of things, and however inexact and absurd these may be, they are
better than emptiness.

"Worse, decidedly worse," says our implacable critic; "when women were
content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping
after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now
they dabble in all things; are weakly aesthetic, weakly scientific,
weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible." Dabbling is
pitiful, certainly, and weakness has few allies, but let us do justice
even to the weak dabblers. AEsthetic, or scientific, or controversial
training has but recently been made possible to women. Their previous
range of study had been very narrow. It is not strange that the least
attainments should seem to them very profound and satisfactory, and the
most manifest deductions pass for original conclusions. It is natural
that their undisciplined faculties should grapple feebly with
difficulties, and be quite unequal to argument. This is no reason for
flinging the baffling volumes at their heads; better so educate their
heads that the volumes shall no longer baffle.

Scolded because they have not an idea beyond dress, laughed at when
they try to think of something better, a word may certainly be said for
the good temper and the patience even of the fashionable women, who
would be wiser if they could.

The fault is, we are assured, that these women take up books only to
enhance their matrimonial value, and with no thought of the worth of
study. Let us be just. What business or the professions are to most men,
marriage is to most women. Men qualify themselves, if they can, for that
competitive examination which is always going on, and which insures
clients to the best lawyers, and business to the best merchant, and
parishes to the best preacher. Women, compelled to wait at home for the
wooing which changes their destiny, qualify themselves with attractions
for that competitive examination which all marriageable young women feel
that they undergo from every marriageable young man. Each has an eye to
business. One does not feel that the motive in the one case is any
higher than in the other.

It is very bad, of course, that marriage should be a matter of business.
It is, perhaps, the most tragic of all perversions. But, evidently, the
evil is not to be abat