The life of a petted creature consists essentially in being deferred to, for being pretty and useless.  A petted child runs a great risk, if it is ever to outgrow childhood; but a pet woman is a perpetual child.  The pet woman of society is everybody’s toy.  Everybody looks at her, admires her, praises and flatters her, stirs her up to play off her little airs and graces for their entertainment; and passes on.  Men of profound sense encourage her to chatter nonsense for their amusement, just as we delight in the tottering steps and stammering mispronunciations of a golden-haired child.  When Lillie has been in Washington, she has had judges of the supreme court and secretaries of state delighted to have her give her opinions in their respective departments.  Scholars and literary men flocked around her, to the neglect of many a more instructed woman, satisfied that she knew enough to blunder agreeably on every subject.

Nor is there any thing in the Christian civilization of our present century that condemns the kind of life we are describing, as in any respect unwomanly or unbecoming.  Something very like it is in a measure considered as the appointed rule of attractive young girls till they are married.

Lillie had numbered among her admirers many lights of the Church.  She had flirted with bishops, priests, and deacons,—­who, none of them, would, for the world, have been so ungallant as to quote to her such dreadful professional passages as, “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.”

In fact, the clergy, when off duty, are no safer guides of attractive young women than other mortal men; and Lillie had so often seen their spiritual attentions degenerate into downright, temporal love-making, that she held them in as small reverence as the rest of their sex.  Only one dreadful John the Baptist of her acquaintance, one of the camel’s-hair-girdle and locust-and-wild-honey species, once encountering Lillie at Saratoga, and observing the ways and manners of the court which she kept there, took it upon him to give her a spiritual admonition.

“Miss Lillie,” he said, “I see no chance for the salvation of your soul, unless it should please God to send the small-pox upon you.  I think I shall pray for that.”

“Oh, horrors! don’t!  I’d rather never be saved,” Lillie answered with a fervent sincerity.

The story was repeated afterwards as an amusing bon mot, and a specimen of the barbarity to which religious fanaticism may lead; and yet we question whether John the Baptist had not the right of it.

For it must at once appear, that, had the small-pox made the above-mentioned change in Lillie’s complexion at sixteen, the entire course of her life would have taken another turn.  The whole world then would have united in letting her know that she must live to some useful purpose, or be nobody and nothing.  Schoolmasters would have scolded her if she idled over her lessons; and her breaking down in arithmetic, and mistakes in history, would no longer have been regarded as interesting.  Clergymen, consulted on her spiritual state, would have told her freely that she was a miserable sinner, who, except she repented, must likewise perish.  In short, all those bitter and wholesome truths, which strengthen and invigorate the virtues of plain people, might possibly have led her a long way on towards saintship.