ocial qualities. By this I do not mean that women should allow
themselves to lose their beauty as they increase in years. Men grow
handsomer as they grow older. There is no reason, there ought to be no
reason, why women should not. They will have a different kind of beauty,
but it will be just as truly beauty and more impressive and attractive
than the beauty of sixteen. It is absurd to suppose that God has made
women so that their glory passes away in half a dozen years. It is
absurd to suppose that thought and feeling and passion and purpose,
all holy instincts and impulses, can chisel away on a woman's face for
thirty, forty, fifty years, and leave that face at the end worse than
they found it. They found it a negative,--mere skin and bone, blood and
muscle and fat. They can but leave their mark upon it, and the mark of
good is good. Pity does not have the same finger-touch as revenge. Love
does not hold the same brush as hatred. Sympathy and gratitude and
benevolence have a different sign-manual from cruelty and carelessness
and deceit. All these busy little sprites draw their fine lines, lay
on their fine colors; the face lights up under their tiny hands; the
prisoned soul shines clearer and clearer through, and there is the
consecration and the poet's dream.

But such beauty is made, not born. Care and weariness and despondency
come of themselves, and groove their own furrows. Hope and intelligence
and interest and buoyancy must be wooed for their gentle and genial
touch. A mother must battle against the tendencies that drag her
downward. She must take pains to grow, or she will not grow. She
must sedulously cultivate her mind and heart, or her old age will be
ungraceful; and if she lose freshness without acquiring ripeness, she is
indeed in an evil case. The first, the most important trust which God
has given to any one is himself. To secure this trust, He has made us so
that in no possible way can we benefit the world so much as by making
the most of ourselves. Indulging our whims, or, inordinately, our just
tastes, is not developing ourselves; but neither is leaving our own
fields to grow thorns and thistles, that we may plant somebody else's
garden-plot, keeping our charge. Even were it possible for a mother to
work well to her children in thus working ill to herself, I do not think
she would be justified in doing it. Her account is not complete when she
says, "Here are they whom thou hast given me." She must f