nment is doubtful or difficult,
so long will there be care and anxiety. When boundless wealth releases
woman from every family care, she immediately makes herself a new set of
cares in another direction, and has just as many anxieties as the most
toilful housekeeper, only they are of a different kind. Talk of labor,
and look at the upper classes in London or in New York in the
fashionable season. Do any women work harder? To rush from crowd to
crowd all night, night after night, seeing what they are tired of,
making the agreeable over an abyss of inward yawning, crowded, jostled,
breathing hot air, and crushed in halls and stairways, without a moment
of leisure for months and months, till brain and nerve and sense reel,
and the country is longed for as a period of resuscitation and relief!
Such is the release from labor and fatigue brought by wealth. The only
thing that makes all this labor at all endurable is, that it is utterly
and entirely useless, and does not good to any one in creation; this
alone makes it genteel, and distinguishes it from the vulgar toils of a
housekeeper. These delicate creatures, who can go to three or four
parties a night for three months, would be utterly desolate if they had
to watch one night in a sick-room; and though they can exhibit any
amount of physical endurance and vigor in crowding into assembly rooms,
and breathe tainted air in an opera-house with the most martyr-like
constancy, they could not sit one half-hour in the close room where the
sister of charity spends hours in consoling the sick or aged poor."

"Mr. Theophilus is quite at home now," said Jennie; "only start him on
the track of fashionable life, and he takes the course like a hound. But
hear, now, our champion of the Evening Post:--

"'The instinct of women to seek a life of repose, their eagerness to
attain the life of elegance, does not mean contempt for labor, but it is
the confession of unfitness for labor. Women were not intended to
work,--not because work is ignoble, but because it is as disastrous to
the beauty of a woman as is friction to the bloom and softness of a
flower. Woman is to be kept in the garden of life; she is to rest, to
receive, to praise; she is to be kept from the workshop world, where
innocence is snatched with rude hands, and softness is blistered into
unsightliness or hardened into adamant. No social truth is more in need
of exposition and illustration than this one; and, above all, the peopl