she responded. "I sometimes
think it is born with them. They drink it in with their mother's milk.
They grow up with it as a daily lesson,--the lesson of avoiding work,
and of considering it delicate and genteel and refined to say that they
never cooked a meal, or swept the parlor, or took a stitch with the
needle, actually priding themselves upon the amount of ignorance of
useful things that they can exhibit. They make the grand mistake of
assuming that sensible men will admire them for this display of folly.
So they drag on until there occurs a prospect of marriage, when they
suddenly wake up to a consciousness of their utter unfitness to become
the head of a family. Why, I know at this moment a young lady of this
description, who expects in a few months to become a wife, and whose
cultivated ignorance of household duties is now the ridicule of her
mother's cook and chambermaid. The prospect of marriage alarmed her for
her total ignorance of domestic duties. She had never made her own bed,
or dusted the furniture; and as to getting up a dinner, she knew even
less than a squaw. She is now vainly seeking to acquire, within a few
months, those branches of domestic knowledge which she has been a whole
life neglecting and despising. She hated work: it was not genteel. Yet
she is eagerly plunging into marriage with the first man who has offered
himself, foolish enough, no doubt, to suppose that in her new position
she will have even less to look after. Formerly, she did nothing: now,
she expects to do even less.

"But what," continued Miss Effie, "is this poor creature to do, if death
or poverty or vice should overtake her husband, and she should be thrown
on her own slender resources? She is driven, to seek employment of some
kind,--to attend in a shop, (for somehow that is considered rather more
genteel than, most other occupations,) or to sew, or to fold books, or
do something else. But she knows nothing of these several arts; and
employers want skilled labor, not novices. She once boasted that she had
never been obliged to work, and now she realizes how much such absurd
boasting is worth. What then? Why, greater privation and suffering,
because of her total unfitness for any station in which she might
otherwise, obtain a living,--the extremity of this destitution being
sometimes such that she is driven to the last shame to which female
virtue can be made to submit."

"You say, Miss Effie, that these foolish lessons ar