“steep the soul
  In one pure love, and it will last thee long.”

The love of truth, the love of excellence, whether or not you clothe them in the person of a special object, will have power to save you much of evil, and lead you into the green glades where the feet of the virtuous have trod.  Preserve the modesty of your sex by filling the mind with noble desires, that shall ward off the corruptions of vanity and idleness.  “A profligate woman, who left her accustomed haunts and 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 if homes are converted into abodes of perpetual sorrow, if not of shame, and the fair young bride is left to weep over the sacrifice of virtue, of honor, and of love, on the altar of an unholy passion.  The influence of a pure woman over young women is invaluable.