let her try us."

"Well," said I, "so be it; and would that all the women seeking homes
and employment could thus fall in with women who have homes and are
perishing in them for want of educated helpers!"

On this question of woman's work I have yet more to say, but must
defer it till another time.

II

WOMAN'S SPHERE

"What do you think of this Woman's Rights question?" said Bob
Stephens. "From some of your remarks, I apprehend that you think there
is something in it. I may be wrong, but I must confess that I have
looked with disgust on the whole movement. No man reverences women as
I do; but I reverence them _as_ women. I reverence them for those very
things in which their sex differs from ours; but when they come upon
our ground, and begin to work and fight after our manner and with our
weapons, I regard them as fearful anomalies, neither men nor women.
These Woman's Rights Conventions appear to me to have ventilated
crudities, absurdities, and blasphemies. To hear them talk about men,
one would suppose that the two sexes were natural-born enemies, and
wonder whether they ever had fathers and brothers. One would think,
upon their showing, that all men were a set of ruffians, in league
against women,--they seeming, at the same time, to forget how on their
very platforms the most constant and gallant defenders of their rights
are men. Wendell Phillips and Wentworth Higginson have put at the
service of the cause masculine training and manly vehemence, and
complacently accepted the wholesale abuse of their own sex at the
hands of their warrior sisters. One would think, were all they say of
female powers true, that our Joan-of-Arcs ought to have disdained to
fight under male captains."

"I think," said my wife, "that, in all this talk about the rights of
men, and the rights of women, and the rights of children, the world
seems to be forgetting what is quite as important, the _duties_ of men
and women and children. We all hear of our _rights_ till we forget our
_duties_; and even theology is beginning to concern itself more with
what man has a right to expect of his Creator than what the Creator
has a right to expect of man."

"You say the truth," said I; "there is danger of just this overaction;
and yet rights must be discussed; because, in order to understand the
duties we owe to any class, we must understand their rights. To know
our duties to men, women, and children, we must know what the rights
of