no leisure for
complaining.

But from whatever cause domestic discontent springs, it makes the home
full of idleness, ennui, and vagrant imaginations, or of fierce
extravagance, and passionate love of amusement. And as a wife holds
the happiness of many in her hands, discontent with her destiny is
peculiarly wicked. If it is resented, she gets what she deserves; if
it is quietly endured, her shame is the greater. For nothing does so
much honor to a wife as her patience; and nothing does her so little
honor as the patience of her husband. And however great his patience
may be, she will not escape personal injury; since none are to be held
innocent who do harm even to their own soul and body. Besides, it is
the inflexible order of things that voluntary faults are followed by
inevitable pain.

Married women, however, are by no means the only complainers. There
is a great army of discontents who, having no men to care for them,
are clamoring, and with justice, for their share of the world's work
and wages. Such women have a perfect right to make a way for
themselves, in whatever direction they best can. Brains are of no sex
or condition, and at any rate, there is no use arguing either their
ability or their right, for necessity has taken the matter beyond the
reach of controversy. Thousands of women have now to choose between
work, charity, or starvation, for the young man of to-day is not a
marrying man. He has but puny passions, and his love is such a very
languid preference that he cannot think of making any sacrifice for
it. So women do not marry, they work; and as the world will take good
work from whoever will give it, the world's custom is flowing to them
by a natural law.

Now, earnest, practical women-workers are blessed, and a blessing; but
the discontented among them, by much talking and little doing,
continually put back the cause they say they wish to advance. No
women are in the main so discontented as women-workers. They go into
the arena, and, fettered by old ideas belonging to a different
condition, they are not willing to be subject to the laws of the
arena. They want, at the same time, the courtesy claimed by weakness
and the honor due to prowess. They complain of the higher wages given
to men, forgetting that the first article of equal payment is equal
worth and work. They know nothing about what Carlyle calls "the
silences;" and the babble of their small beginnings is, to the
busy world, irritating