took service in a New York boarding-house, said, 'She had never
heard talk so vile at the Five Points as from the ladies at the
boarding-house.' And why? Because they were idle; because, having
nothing worthy to engage them, they dwelt, with unnatural curiosity,
on the ill they dared not go to see." This seems like an exaggeration.
Yet Margaret Fuller is responsible for the utterance.[A] Avoid
idleness. The mind, like a mill, must have some thought in the hopper
of reflection, or the machinery will prove to be self-destructive.
Shun flattery. The woman who permits in her life the alloy of vanity;
who lives upon flattery, coarse or fine, is lost, and loses the
tribute paid the woman by the iron-handed warrior, whom he rejoiced to
recognize as his helpmeet, saying, "Whom God loves, to him he gives
such a wife."

[Footnote A: Woman of the Nineteenth Century, p. 168.]

The influence of married women over their younger sisters may be
beneficent and good. It often is pernicious and bad. Young women judge
of men very much by what married women say concerning men. If they
speak of men as virtuous and pure, as noble and generous; if they can
talk of their husbands as of men who have honored them with their
love, and whose kindness blesses their daily life, then will the
maiden of a pure heart believe that her dream is real, and that the
man of her choice is pure; whose heart is free and open as her own;
all of whose thoughts may be avowed; who is incapable of wronging the
innocent, or still further degrading the fallen,--a man, in short,
whose brute nature is entirely subject to the impulses of his
better self. Such men there are in countless numbers, who have kept
themselves free from stain, and who can look the purest maiden in the
eye and not shun the glance. Through God's grace they have been saved
from the path full of peril, and desire nothing more than to share
the confidence and friendship of the pure. If, on the other hand, the
unmarried are assured by the married that, "if they knew men as they
do,"--that is, by being married to them,--"they would not expect
continence or self-government from them;" if mothers permit their
daughters to mingle freely with the dissipated and vile because of
rank or wealth, and when warned that such are not fit companions for
a chaste being, reply, "All men are bad sometimes in their life; but
give them a pure wife and a home and they will not want to go wrong,"
then be not surprised i