s silk and purple_." She dresses suitably, richly if
occasion demand it, but never showily. If she has to walk as a rule, she
will not buy dresses that look fit only for a carriage: she will not wear,
in church, a brilliant dress that would be suitable at a flower-show.

"_Her husband is known in the gates_." There was doubtless a great
difference among the husbands at the gate, and I feel sure that this one
took a specially large and public-spirited view of the business there
discussed. The Virtuous Woman would not usurp his office, just because she
had the power of speaking well,--she would remember the Russian proverb,
"The Master is the Head of the House, while the Mistress is its Soul,"
and she would be a very high-souled mistress, and care greatly that her
master should not only be a good husband and a father, but should also
serve his generation as a good citizen and a true patriot. When the public
good demanded sacrifices, she would not drag him back by insisting on his
duty to his family, nor would she persuade him to rob the public stores,
or time, by taking little perquisites or shortening his office hours. She
would feel with De Tocqueville, who says, "A hundred times I have seen
weak men show real public virtue, because they had by their sides women
who supported them--not by advice as to particulars, but by fortifying
their feelings of duty, and by directing their ambition. More frequently,
I must confess, I have observed the domestic influence gradually
transforming a man, naturally generous, noble, and unselfish, into a
cowardly, commonplace, place-hunting, self-seeker, thinking of public
business only as the means of making himself comfortable; and this simply
by daily contact with a well-conducted woman, a faithful wife, an
excellent mother, but from whose mind the grand notion of public duty was
entirely absent."

The husband of "a superior woman" is usually much to be pitied, but surely
the reason is that the woman is not superior enough. She has capabilities
and knowledge, and has learnt to value them, and is right in so doing,
but she has not learnt the next page of Life's Lesson Book, which is, the
relative insignificance of her own acquirements, and the value of the
qualities she has not got,--qualities which her husband very likely
possesses, only he has not the feminine power of expression. How often a
woman's seeming superiority lies in this gift of words, which, as George
Eliot says, is in he