and purpose, all holy instincts and impulses, can chisel away on a
woman's face for thirty, forty, fifty years, and leave that face at the
end worse than they found it. They found it a negative,--mere skin and
bone, blood and muscle and fat. They can but leave their mark upon it,
and the mark of good is good. Pity does not have the same finger-touch
as revenge. Love does not hold the same brush as hatred. Sympathy and
gratitude and benevolence have a different sign-manual from cruelty and
carelessness and deceit. All these busy little sprites draw their fine
lines, lay on their fine colors; the face lights up under their tiny
hands; the prisoned soul shines clearer and clearer through, and there
is the consecration and the poet's dream.

But such beauty is made, not born. Care and despondency come of
themselves, and groove their own furrows. Hope and intelligence and
interest and buoyancy must be wooed for their gentle and genial touch.
A mother must battle against the tendencies that drag her downward.
She must take pains to grow, or she will not grow. She must sedulously
cultivate her mind and heart, or her old age will be ungraceful; and if
she lose freshness without acquiring ripeness, she is indeed in an evil
case. The first, the most important trust which God has given to any
one is himself. To secure this trust, He has made us so that in no
possible way can we benefit the world so much as by making the most of
ourselves. Indulging our whims, or, inordinately, our just tastes, is
not developing ourselves; but neither is leaving our own fields to grow
thorns and thistles, that we may plant somebody else's garden-plot,
keeping our charge. Even were it possible for a mother to work well
to her children in thus working ill to herself, I do not think she
would be justified in doing it. Her account is not complete when she
says, "Here are they whom thou hast given me." She must first say,
"Here am I." But when it is seen that suicide is also child-murder, it
must appear that she is under doubly heavy bonds for herself.

Husbands, moreover, have claims, though wives often ignore them. It is
the commonest thing in the world to see parents tender of their
children's feelings, alive to their wants, indulgent to their tastes,
kind, considerate, and forbearing; but to each other hasty, careless,
and cold. Conjugal love often seems to die out before parental love.
It ought not so to be. Husband and wife shou