_ shall not mean
worsted-work. I understand the Scriptural word "helpmeet," as applied to
wife, in the New England sense of "help." She should, above all, be a
creature not too bright and good to know how to prepare and serve up
human nature's daily food. I have never seen without emotion the epitaph
placed by a high legal dignitary in a neighboring State on the tomb of
his first wife:--

"An excellent woman and a good cook."

And when I hear an able-bodied woman in easy circumstances speak of
housekeeping as too much for her strength, or "too wearing," I set her
down very low on my list of contemptibles, and ask her, mentally, "What
the devil then are you good for?" But you and your friends, Hipparchia,
would make a world all cubes, parallelopipedons, and pyramids,--an
achromatic world, peopled with wise creatures who could demonstrate the
usefulness of all they did, and the economy of the processes by which
they did it. As there is no place in such a world for women as we know
them, you wish to create Eve over again, or rather to call forth a
female Adam. I object. Man cannot live by pure mathematics alone.
Imagination is a faculty of the mind, as much as reason. Now, women are
the imaginative side of the human race; not only imaginative themselves,
but the cause of imagination in others. I like mountains and clouds,
trees, birds, and flowers,--the raw material of poetry; but to me
handsome women are more pleasant than all of them,--they are little
poems ready made. I like their rustling dresses, their bright, graceful
ways, the "flash of swift white feet" in ball-room; even their roguish
airs and childlike affectations. And if some of them do not trim their
souls quite as much as their gowns, or perhaps venture into society with
minds naked to the verge of indecent ignorance, then I say to these,
"Talk to me only with your eyes,"--and they can be more eloquent than
any Demosthenes of your New England Athens. Women are younger than men,
and nearer to nature; they have more animal life and spirits and glee.
Their lively, frolicsome, sunshiny chatter keeps existence from growing
mouldy and stale. We have it on the authority of the wittiest of
Frenchmen, that for the purposes of pleasant, every-day life,
_L'enjouement vaut mieux que l'esprit_. If I wish to discuss a question
of political economy, or of metaphysics, I can go to men; but the art of
talking the men of to-day have lost. They either lecture, dispute, or