people are often selfish in the harm they do husbands, and brothers, and
sisters, and unconscionable friends, by doing their duties for them. You
recognize that you yourself are on a downward path when you leave duties
undone. You have no right to help any one else to tread that path. It is
much pleasanter to spoil your brothers than to make them take their fair
share of family burdens; it is much pleasanter to be popular,--but if your
brother grows up selfish, three-fourths of the sin will be on your head.
You will have to be very careful to convince him that you are not selfish
by sacrificing yourself on every occasion when it is not bad for him, but
if you are to do him good and not evil all the days of his life, you must
remember that you are your brother's keeper in this matter.

"_She worketh willingly with her hands_." The idea is going out that, to
be like a lady, you must sit with your hands before you. I heard of a
village tea the other day where a curate's maid-of-all-work was boasting
that her mistress was a real lady who could not do a thing! "Dear! how
strange," said an old servant; "my first mistress taught me, with her own
hands, all the house-work I know." "Ah! she couldn't have been a _real_
lady," said the other. "Perhaps not," said the old woman reflectively; "I
can't tell, but I know she was an Earl's daughter." If you knew anything
of Colonial life in old uncivilized days, you would know how invariably it
turned out that those settlers were nobody at home who talked there about
what they were "accustomed to," and how they could not do this or
that,--while the real ladies laughed and buckled to. I do not believe in a
woman being thoroughbred if she cannot do what comes to her to do; she may
have little bodily strength, but if she is of the right sort, spirit
carries her through, just as you often find uneducated people, unnerved by
pain or fright, crying and pitying themselves: a real lady has nerve for
it all, though she is ten times more sensitive, and, till the occasion
arises, she may lie on the sofa all day, and believe herself quite unable
to do a thing!

People sometimes seem to think it the mark of a sensitive, high-bred,
refined nature to be unable to conquer fads, and fancies, and fears. You
hear them say, with an air of modest pride, "I _can't_ eat this or that;"
"I _can't_ touch spiders:" very likely they suffer if they do, and I do
not see that they need be always forcing themselves to