ines
only upon its worshippers. So a clever woman, whether she be a painter
or a teacher or a dress-maker,--if she really has an object in life, a
career, she is safe. She is a power. She commands a realm. She owns
a world. She is bringing things to bear. Let her alone. But it is a
very dangerous and a very melancholy thing common women to be "lying on
their oars" long at a time. Some of these were, I suppose, what
Winthrop calls "business-women, fighting their way out of vulgarity
into style." The process is rather uninteresting, but the result may
be glorious. Yet a good many of them were good honest, kind, common
girls, only demoralized by long lying around in a waiting posture. It
had taken the fire and sparkle out of them. They were not in a healthy
state. They were degraded, contracted, flaccid. They did not hold
themselves high. They knew that in a market-point of view there was a
frightful glut of women. The usually small ratio of men was unusually
diminished by the absence of those who gone to the war, and of those
who, as was currently reported, were ashamed that they had not gone. A
few available men had it all their own way; the women were on the
lookout for them, instead of being themselves looked out for. They
talked about "gentlemen," and being "companionable to GEN-tlemen," and
who was "fascinating to GEN-tlemen," till the "grand old name became a
nuisance. There was an under-current of unsated coquetry. I don't
suppose they were any sillier than the rest of us; but when our
silliness is mixed in with housekeeping and sewing and teaching and
returning visits, it passes off harmless. When it is stripped of all
these modifiers, however, and goes off exposed to Saratoga, and melts
in with a hundred other sillinesses, it makes a great show.

No, I don't like Saratoga. I don't think it is wholesome. No place
can be healthy that keeps up such an unmitigated dressing.

"Where do you walk?" I asked an artless little lady.

"O, almost always on the long piazza. It is so clean there, and we
don't like to soil our dresses."

Now I ask if girls could ever get into that state in the natural course
of things! It is the result of bad habits. They cease to care for
things which they ought to like to do, and they devote themselves to
what ought to be only an incident. People dress in their best without
break. They go to the springs before breakfast in shining raiment, and
they go into the par