“She planteth a vineyard.”  I should like my Virtuous Woman to be fond of gardening, and at all events read in Bacon’s Essays how God Almighty first planted a garden.

“She strengthened her arms.”  This verse makes us fancy the Virtuous Woman as being unpleasingly strong, but we should guard against being purposely weak, with an idea of its being pleasing; Thackeray’s Amelia is hardly a good model, and Patient Grizzel did her husband an infinity of harm!

“Her candle goeth not out by night.”  But the Virtuous Woman must be self-denying in the matter of sitting up, now that modern life makes so many more demands upon her brain.  You know it is self-indulgence when you sit up late; you were not bound to be so sociable as all that; you only hinder yourself and others from proper time for prayer and sleep; if you made a move after a reasonable amount of talk, the others would be sensible too.  And so you repent and force yourself to get up very punctually the next morning, not seeing that this is on the principle that two wrongs make a right.  It is your duty to get up in good time, but it is also a duty to get sufficient sleep.  I know you have a more comfortable feeling when you have punished yourself,—­you feel that you took the self-indulgence and you want to pay for it.  This sounds fair and honest, but it is not, because you pay for it with the health and strength that God gave you to use for Him.  Instead of the satisfactory scourge and hair shirt of rising betimes next morning, try the more commonplace penance of going to bed in proper time the next night, without any dawdling.  So many girls do things in a dreamy, dawdling way, that must be a sore trial to those about them:  if a thing has to be done, you should do it in a quick, purpose-like way, and not waste your own time and other people’s temper.  A girl will placidly tell you, “I’m always slow, it’s my way,” never realizing that “ways” may be very objectionable.  We think it dishonest in workmen that there should be a difference between a man who works by time and one who works by the piece:  you blame the workman who spends twice as much of his master’s time as he need, but, when you dawdle, you spend your Master’s time:  getting through with things quickly and “deedily” is a matter of habit, and the Virtuous Woman practises it in everything she does.

“Her hands hold the distaff.”  The Virtuous Woman will not be satisfied until she knows how to make a dress and do plain work; not that, having acquired the knowledge, she will necessarily use it, for a woman with brains and education can employ her time to more purpose, and can give employment to poorer women at her gate, by putting out her work.  It is burying her talent in the ground if she employs, in making her children’s frocks, the time which should be spent in cultivating her mind, so as to be fit to educate them when they are older.