lk! Because of this
cheerful interest in flowers, and this ingenious skill in dealing with
them, the man himself is interesting. All his powers are alert, and
his judgment is valued in public life and in private business. Or is
it more exact to say that because he is the kind of man who would
insist upon having such interests outside his daily work, he is still
fresh and young and capable of growth at an age when many other men are
dull and old and certain that the time of decay is at hand?

There are two reasons why women need to cultivate these large and
abiding interests even more persistently than men. In the first place,
they have more leisure. They are indeed the only leisure class in the
country, the only large body of persons who are not called upon to win
their daily bread in direct wage-earning ways. As yet, fortunately,
few men among us have so little self-respect as to idle about our
streets and drawing-rooms because their fathers are rich enough to
support them. We are not without our unemployed poor; but roving
tramps and idle clubmen are after all not of large consequence. Our
serious, non-producing classes are chiefly women. It is the regular
ambition of the chivalrous American to make all the women who depend on
him so comfortable that they need do nothing for themselves. Machinery
has taken nearly all the former occupations of women out of the home
into the shop and factory. Widespread wealth and comfort, and the
inherited theory that it is not well for the woman to earn money so
long as father or brothers can support her, have brought about a
condition of things in which there is social danger, unless with the
larger leisure are given high and enduring interests. To health
especially there is great danger, for nothing breaks down a woman's
health like idleness and its resulting ennui. More people, I am sure,
are broken down nervously because they are bored, than because they are
overworked; and more still go to pieces through fussiness, unwholesome
living, worry over petty details, and the daily disappointments which
result from small and superficial training. And then, besides the
danger to health, there is the danger to character. I need not dwell
on the undermining influence which men also feel when occupation is
taken away and no absorbing private interest fills the vacancy. The
vices of luxurious city life are perhaps hardly more destructive to
character than is the slow deteriora