duties it takes in. A
sensible woman loves to imitate that order which is stamped on the whole
creation of God. All the operations of nature are uniform even in their
changes, and regular in their infinite variety. Nay, the great Author of
Nature himself disdains not to be called the God of order."

"I agree with you," said Sir John. "A philosophical lady may 'read
Malebranche, Boyle, and Locke;' she may boast of her intellectual
superiority; she may talk of abstract and concrete; of substantial forms
and essences; complex ideas and mixed modes, of identity and relation;
she may decorate all the logic of one sex with all the rhetoric of the
other; yet if her affairs are _delabre_, if her house is disorderly, her
servants irregular, her children neglected, and her table ill-arranged,
she will indicate the want of the most valuable faculty of the human
mind, a sound judgment."

"It must, however, be confessed," replied Mr. Stanley, "that such
instances are so rare, that the exceptions barely serve to establish the
rule. I have known twenty women mismanage their affairs, through a bad
education, through ignorance, especially of arithmetic, that grand
deficiency in the education of women, through a multiplicity of vain
accomplishments, through an excess of dissipation, through a devotedness
to personal embellishments, through an absorption of the whole soul in
music, for one who has made her husband metaphysically miserable."

"What marks the distinction," said Mr. Carlton, "between the judicious
and the vulgar economist is this: the narrow-minded woman succeeds
tolerably in the filling up, but never in the outline. She is made up of
detail but destitute of plan. Petty duties demand her whole grasp of
mind, and, after all, the thing is incomplete. There is so much bustle
and evident exertion in all she does! she brings into company a mind
exhausted with her little efforts! overflowing with a sense of her own
merits! looking up to her own performance as the highest possible
elevation of the human intellect, and looking down on the attainments of
more highly gifted women, as so many obstructions to their usefulness;
always drawing comparisons to her own advantage, with the cultivated and
the refined, and concluding that because she possesses not their
elegance they must necessarily be deficient in her art. While economists
of a higher strain--I draw from living and not absent instances," added
he, looking benignantly round