ned to the luxurious couches on which they spend their "inglorious
days." Or, thirdly, we may find another and quite different development
of this perverted but not destroyed energy,[18] this closing of the top
of the chimneys. Many a woman is antagonistic, is combative, because she
is forced into such a position, not because she herself desires it. The
smoke starts for the top of the chimney, as it should; but, baffled, it
frets itself in eddying whirls against the bricks, till, driven by the
necessity of an outlet somewhere, not understanding what the trouble is,
but only dimly realizing that there is trouble, it rushes back, choking
in its passage the fire, and revenging itself on the author of the
repression.

Men and women are wonderfully alike after all. The same motives move
them, the same incitements spur to honorable effort, and if a girl is
assured that, being half-educated, half-educated she must remain, she
will not, unless driven by the internal fire of irrepressible genius,
try very earnestly to fit herself for the higher plane which she can
never reach.

"Were it not better done, as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?"

By all means it were far better, if effort for broader work be of no
avail, to cease to think of it, and to make one's self as comfortable as
possible. And yet, how about the comfort in the coming years, when her
girls, who, thanks to the inevitable march of Truth, will have a better
chance than she, and her boys, to whom the last stage of education is to
be had for the asking, come to her in vain for sympathy and
appreciation, to say nothing of the husband, from all understanding of
whose rational thought she finds herself barred out?[19] Babies and
half-educated children are very pretty to play with, interesting to
watch, and delightful to care for, but when they are married and have
children, for they can never be said, in any true sense, to be wives or
mothers, they appear in a somewhat different aspect. I have sometimes,
out of sheer pity, wished that there were some State asylum for such
children, when they are left, as the chances of life and death so often
leave them, unprotected in the world, with dependent children clinging
to their useless hands. I have never seen a sadder sight than such a
woman, her physical system in perfect order and superbly developed,
looking stunned and helpless into the world, unable to d