our votes.  There is no magnanimity in admitting all this.  It is the due of that noblest work of God, a strong, good, gentle man to receive the concession and to know how frankly we make it.  To them as theologians, logicians, impartial historians, as priests, prophets, and kings—­we do cheerful obeisance, yet with the look of one who but half hides a happy secret in her heart that compensates for all she resigns.  There is not a true-hearted woman alive who would give up her birthright to become—­we will say Christopher Columbus himself.

It must be a fine thing, though, to be a man on some accounts;—­to be emancipated forever-and-a-day from the thraldom of skirts for instance, and to push through a crowd to read the interjectional headlines upon a bulletin board, instead of going meekly and unenlightened home, to be told by John three hours later that “a woman’s curiosity passes masculine comprehension, and that he is too tired and hungry to talk.”  It must be a satisfaction to be able to hit another nail with a hammer than that attached to one’s own thumb, and to hurl a stone from the shoulder instead of tossing it from the wrist; there must be sublimity in the thrill with which the stroke-oar of the ’Varsity’s crew bends to his work, and the ecstasy of the successful crack pitcher of a baseball team passes the descriptive power of a woman’s tongue.  Nevertheless, the greatest architectural genius who ever astonished the world with a pyramid, a cathedral, or a triumphal street-arch, could never create and keep a Home.  The meanest hut in the Jersey meadows, the doorway of which frames in the dusk of evening the figure of a woman with a baby in her arms, silhouetted upon the red background of fire and lamp kindled to welcome the returning husband and father, harbors as guest a viewless but “incomparable sweet” angel that never visits the superb club-house where men go from spirit to spirit in the vain attempt to make home of that which is no home.

“You write—­do you?” snarled Napoleon I, insolently to the wittiest woman of the Paris salons.  “What, for instance, have been some of your works since you have been in this country?”

“Three children, sire!” retorted the mother of Madame Emile de Girardin.

It was this same ready witted mother whom another woman pronounced the happiest of mortals.

“She does everything well—­children, books and preserves.”

Her range was wide.  Comparatively few of her sex can grasp that octave.  Upon the simplest, as upon the wisest, Heaven has bestowed the talent of home-making, precious and incommunicable.

Woman’s Work in the Home!  Taking up, without irreverence, the magnificent hyperbole of the beloved disciple, I may truly say, “that if they should be written, every one, I suppose the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.”