nature will come to assist you in your growth and development and efforts, and other things being equal, instead of singing to yourself or being anxious as to the size of your audience, you will seldom find time for the first, and your anxiety will be as to whether the place has an audience-chamber large enough to accommodate even a small portion of the people who will seek admittance.  You remember Jenny Lind.

* * * * *

Is it your ambition to become a fashionable society woman, this and nothing more, intent only upon your own pleasure and satisfaction?  Then stop and meditate, if only for a moment; for if this is the case, you never will, ay, you never can find the true and the genuine, for you fail to recognize the great law that there is no such thing as finding true happiness by searching for it directly, and the farther on you go the more flimsy and shallow and unsatisfying that imitation you are willing to accept for the genuine will become.  You will thereby rob life of its chief charms, defeat the very purpose you have in view.  And, while you are at this moment meditating, oh grasp the truth of the great law that you will find your own life only in losing it in the service of others,—­that the more of your life you so give, the fuller and the richer, the greater and the grander, the more beautiful and the more happy your own life will become.

And with your abundant means and opportunities build your life upon this great law of service, and experience the pleasure of growing into that full, rich, ever increasing and satisfying life that will result, and that will make you better known, more honored and blessed, than the life of any mere society woman can be, or any life, for that matter; for you are thus living a life the highest this world can know.  And you will thus hasten the day when, standing and looking back and seeing the emptiness and the littleness of the other life as compared with this, you will bless the time that your better judgment prevailed and saved you from it.  Or, if you chance to be in it already, delay not, but commence now to build upon this true foundation.

Instead of discharging your footman, as did a woman of whom I chance to know, because he finally refused to stand in the rain by the side of her carriage, with his arms folded just so, standing immovable like a mummy (I had almost said like a fool), daring to look neither to one side nor the other, but all the time in the direction of her so-called ladyship, while she spent an hour or two in doing fifteen or twenty minutes’ shopping in her desire to make it known that this is Mrs. Q.’s carriage, and this is the footman that goes with it,—­instead of doing this, give him an umbrella if necessary, and take him to aid you as you go on your errands of mercy and cheer and service and loving kindness to the innumerable ones all about you who so stand in need of them.

Is there any comparison between the appellation “Lady Bountiful” and “a proud, selfish, pleasure-seeking woman”?  And, much more, do you think there is any comparison whatever between the real pleasure and happiness and satisfaction in the lives of the two?