dulness would be perpetually kept at bay.

To the other question, whether in actual life I have ever seen this
realized, I answer yes, in several instances.

Not in very many instances, yet in more than one. Women, when they have
conceived the idea that this renewal is necessary, have resolution
enough for the realization of it. There is hardly any task too hard for
them, if they believe it essential to the conjugal life. I could give
you the name and address of one who mastered Greek in order not to be
excluded from her husband's favorite pursuit; others have mastered other
languages for the same object, and even some branch of science for which
the feminine mind has less natural affinity than it has for imaginative
literature. Their remarkable incapacity for independent mental labor is
accompanied by an equally remarkable capacity for labor under an
accepted masculine guidance. In this connection I may without
impropriety mention one Englishwoman, for she is already celebrated, the
wife of Sir Samuel Baker, the discoverer of the Albert Nyanza. She stood
with him on the shore of that unknown sea, when first it was beheld by
English eyes; she had passed with him through all the hard preliminary
toils and trials. She had learned Arabic with him in a year of necessary
but wearisome delay; her mind had travelled with his mind as her feet
had followed his footsteps. Scarcely less beautiful, if less heroic, is
the picture of the geologist's wife, Mrs. Buckland, who taught herself
to reconstruct broken fossils, and did it with a surprising delicacy,
and patience, and skill, full of science, yet more than science, the
perfection of feminine art.

The privacy of married life often prevents us from knowing the extent to
which intelligent women have renewed their minds by fresh and varied
culture for the purpose of retaining their ascendency over their
husbands, or to keep up the interest of their lives. It is done much
more frequently by women than by men. They have so much less egotism, so
much more adaptability, that they fit themselves to us oftener than we
adapt ourselves to them. But in a quiet perfect marriage these efforts
would be mutual. The husband would endeavor to make life interesting to
his companion by taking a share in some pursuit which was really her
own. It is easier for us than it was for our ancestors to do this--at
least for our immediate ancestors. There existed, fifty years ago, a
most irrational preju