says that in days gone by
she had been extremely fastidious in her dress, and had spent whole days
before her mirror endeavoring to correct its deficiencies. Her head,
"which had done no harm, was forced into a waving head-dress." But all
this is changed. Now "no gold and jewels adorn her girdle; it is made of
wool, plain, and scrupulously clean. It is intended to keep her clothes
right, and not to cut her waist in two."

Eustochium, as a professed virgin of the Church, is warned not to trifle
with verse, nor to make herself gay with lyric songs. "And do not, out
of affectation, follow the sickly taste of married ladies who, now
pressing their teeth together, now keeping their lips wide apart, speak
with a lisp, and purposely clip their words, because they fancy that to
pronounce them naturally is a mark of country breeding."

In another place the Father of asceticism says: "To-day you may see
women cramming their wardrobes with dresses, changing their gowns from
day to day, and for all that unable to vanquish the moths. Now and then
one more scrupulous wears out a single dress; yet, while she appears in
rags, her boxes are full. Parchments are dyed purple, gold is melted
into lettering, manuscripts are decked with jewels, while Christ lies at
the door naked and dying. When they hold out a hand to the needy they
sound a trumpet; when they invite to a love-feast they engage a crier. I
lately saw the noblest lady in Rome--I suppress her name, for I am no
satirist--with a band of eunuchs before her in the basilica of the
blessed Peter. She was giving money to the poor, a coin apiece; and this
with her own hand, that she might be accounted more religious. Hereupon
a by no means uncommon incident occurred. An old woman, 'full of age and
rags,' ran forward to get a second coin, but when her turn came she
received, not a penny, but a blow hard enough to draw blood from her
guilty veins." Rome had always successfully withstood the rhetorical
lashings of her censors; had it not been for this power of resistance,
the castigations of a Jerome surely would have sufficed to hold the
natural frivolity of the women of his time at least within the bounds of
modesty.

The moral influence of Jerome illustrated the danger of insisting on
perfection with the result of falling below the average of possible
attainment. In his letters to Paula, Eustochium, Marcella, and Asella,
women who delighted him by manifesting an astounding resolutio