cured a
fortune that shall place my wife above all necessity of work or
care."

"I desire to hear from you," said Theophilus, "when you have found the
sum that will keep a woman from care. I know of women now inhabiting
palaces, waited on at every turn by servants, with carriages, horses,
jewels, laces, Cashmeres, enough for princesses, who are eaten up by
care. One lies awake all night on account of a wrinkle in the waist of
her dress; another is dying because no silk of a certain inexpressible
shade is to be found in New York; a third has had a dress sent home,
which has proved such a failure that life seems no longer worth
having. If it were not for the consolations of religion, one doesn't
know what would become of her. The fact is, that care and labor are as
much correlated to human existence as shadow is to light; there is no
such thing as excluding them from any mortal lot. You may make a
canary-bird or a gold-fish live in absolute contentment without a care
or labor, but a human being you cannot. Human beings are restless and
active in their very nature, and will do something, and that something
will prove a care, a labor, and a fatigue, arrange it how you will. As
long as there is anything to be desired and not yet attained, so long
its attainment will be attempted; so long as that attainment is
doubtful or difficult, so long will there be care and anxiety. When
boundless wealth releases woman from every family care, she
immediately makes herself a new set of cares in another direction, and
has just as many anxieties as the most toilful housekeeper, only they
are of a different kind. Talk of labor, and look at the upper classes
in London or in New York in the fashionable season. Do any women work
harder? To rush from crowd to crowd all night, night after night,
seeing what they are tired of, making the agreeable over an abyss of
inward yawning, crowded, jostled, breathing hot air, and crushed in
halls and stairways, without a moment of leisure for months and
months, till brain and nerve and sense reel, and the country is longed
for as a period of resuscitation and relief! Such is the release from
labor and fatigue brought by wealth. The only thing that makes all
this labor at all endurable is, that it is utterly and entirely
useless, and does no good to any one in creation; this alone makes it
genteel, and distinguishes it from the vulgar toils of a housekeeper.
These delicate creatures, who can go to three or