four parties a night
for three months, would be utterly desolate if they had to watch one
night in a sick-room; and though they can exhibit any amount of
physical endurance and vigor in crowding into assembly rooms, and
breathe tainted air in an opera-house with the most martyr-like
constancy, they could not sit one half-hour in the close room where
the sister of charity spends hours in consoling the sick or aged
poor."

"Mr. Theophilus is quite at home now," said Jenny; "only start him on
the track of fashionable life, and he takes the course like a hound.
But hear, now, our champion of the 'Evening Post':--

"'The instinct of women to seek a life of repose, their eagerness to
attain the life of elegance, does not mean contempt for labor, but it
is a confession of unfitness for labor. Women were not intended to
work,--not because work is ignoble, but because it is as disastrous
to the beauty of a woman as is friction to the bloom and softness of a
flower. Woman is to be kept in the garden of life; she is to rest, to
receive, to praise; she is to be kept from the workshop world, where
innocence is snatched with rude hands, and softness is blistered into
unsightliness or hardened into adamant. No social truth is more in
need of exposition and illustration than this one; and, above all, the
people of New England need to know it, and, better, they need to
believe it.

"'It is therefore with regret that we discover Christopher Crowfield
applying so harshly, and, as we think so indiscriminatingly, the theory
of work to women, and teaching a society made up of women sacrificed
in the workshops of the State, or to the dustpans and kitchens of the
house, that women must work, ought to work, and are dishonored if
they do not work; and that a woman committed to the drudgery of a
household is more creditably employed than when she is charming,
fascinating, irresistible, in the parlor or boudoir. The consequence
of this fatal mistake is manifest throughout New England,--in New
England where the girls are all beautiful and the wives and mothers
faded, disfigured, and without charm or attractiveness. The moment a
girl marries, in New England, she is apt to become a drudge or a lay
figure on which to exhibit the latest fashions. She never has
beautiful hands, and she would not have a beautiful face if a
utilitarian society could "apply" her face to anything but the
pleasure of the eye. Her hands lose their shape and softness afte