Woman, he said in the course of it, was created to look after the ways of her household in order that man might go out into the world and make a career.  No womanly woman cared to make a career.  What the womanly woman desired was to remain an Incentive, an Ideal, an Inspiration.  If the womanly woman possessed a talent, she did not use it—­for this would unsex her—­she sacrificed it in herself in order that she might return it to the race through her sons.  Self-sacrifice—­to use a worn metaphor—­self-sacrifice was the breath of the nostrils of the womanly woman.  It was for her power of self-sacrifice that men loved her and made an Ideal of her.  Whatever else woman gave up, she must always retain her power of self-sacrifice if she expected the heart of her husband to rejoice in her.  The home was founded on sacrifice, and woman was the pillar and the ornament of the home.  There was her sphere, her purpose, her mission.  All things outside of that sphere belonged to man, except the privilege of ministering to the sick and the afflicted in other households.

He leaned forward in the old pulpit, his shapely, well-kept hand hanging over the edge in one of his most characteristic gestures; and the autumn sunlight, falling through the plain glass windows, shone on his temples.  Immediately below him, in a front pew, sat his mother, a dried little old woman, with beady black eyes and a pointed chin, which jutted out from between the stiff taffeta strings of her poke bonnet.  She gazed upward, clasping her Prayer-book in her black woollen gloves, which were darned in the fingers; and though she appeared to listen attentively to the sermon, she was wondering all the time if the coloured servant at home would remember to baste the roast pig she had left in the oven.  To-day was the Reverend Orlando’s birthday, and the speckled pig she had fattened throughout the summer, lay now, with an apple in his mouth, on the trencher.  She had invited Molly to dine with them rather against her wishes, for she harboured a secret fear that the girl was trying to marry the rector.  Besides, as she said to herself, with her eyes on Orlando’s hand, how on earth could he do full justice to the pig if there was a pretty parishioner to distract his attention?

In the pew next to Mrs. Mullen sat old Adam Doolittle, his hand behind his left ear, his withered old lips moving as if he were repeating the words of the sermon.  From time to time he shook his head as though he disagreed with a sentence, and then his lips worked more rapidly, and an obstinate, argumentative look appeared in his face.  Mentally he was conducting a theological dispute with the preacher in which the younger man suffered always a crushing rhetorical defeat.  Behind him sat the miller and Blossom Revercomb, who threw an occasional anxious glance at the empty seat beside Mrs. Gay and Kesiah; and behind them Judy Hatch raised her plain, enraptured face to the pulpit, where the rector had shaken out an immaculately ironed handkerchief and wiped his brow.  She knew who had ironed that handkerchief on Wednesday, which was Mrs. Mullen’s washing day, and her heart rejoiced as she remembered the care with which she had folded the creases.