and rest up to it.  Men, as a general thing, will not tell you so.  They talk about having the slippers ready, and enjoin women to be domestic.  But men are blockheads,—­dear, and affectionate, and generous blockheads,—­benevolent, large-hearted, and chivalrous,—­kind, and patient, and hard-working,—­but stupid where women are concerned.  Indispensable and delightful as they are in real life, pleasant and comfortable as women actually find them, not one in ten thousand but makes a dunce of himself the moment he opens his mouth to theorize about women.  Besides, they have an axe to grind.  The pretty things they inculcate—­slippers, and coffee, and care, and courtesy—­ought indeed to be done, but the others ought not to be left undone.  And to the former women seldom need to be exhorted.  They take to them naturally.  A great many more women bore boorish husbands with fond little attentions than wound appreciative ones by neglect.  Women domesticate themselves to death already.  What they want is cultivation.  They need to be stimulated to develop a large, comprehensive, catholic life, in which their domestic duties shall have an appropriate niche, and not dwindle down to a narrow and servile one, over which those duties shall spread and occupy the whole space.

This mistake is the foundation of a world of wretchedness and ruin.  I can see Satan standing at the mother’s elbow.  He follows her around into the nursery and the kitchen.  He tosses up the babies and the omelets, delivers dutiful harangues about the inappropriateness of the piano and the library, and grins fiendishly in his sleeve at the wreck he is making,—­a wreck not necessarily of character, but of happiness; for I suppose Satan has so bad a disposition, that, if he cannot do all the harm he would wish, he will still do all he can.  It is true that there are thousands of noble men married to fond and foolish women, and they are both happy.  Well, the fond and foolish women are very fortunate.  They have fallen into hands that will entreat them tenderly, and they will not perceive that anything is kept back.  Nor are the noble men wholly unfortunate, in that they have not taken to their hearths shrews.  But this is not marriage.

There are women less foolish.  They see their husbands attracted in other directions more often and more easily than in theirs.  They have too much sterling worth and profound faith to be vulgarly jealous.  They fear nothing like shame or crime; but they feel the fact that their own preoccupation with homely household duties precludes real companionship; the interchange of emotions, thoughts, sentiments, a living and palpable and vivid contact of mind with mind, of heart with heart.  They see others whose leisure ministers to grace, accomplishments, piquancy, and attractiveness, and the moth flies towards the light by his own nature.  Because he is a wise and virtuous and honorable moth, he does not dart into the flame.  He does not even scorch his wings.