bly lessened."

"It is perfectly just," said Sir John, "and this comfortless deficiency
has naturally taught men to inveigh against that higher kind of
knowledge which they suppose, though unjustly, to be the cause of
ignorance in domestic matters. It is not entirely to gratify the animal,
as Miss Sparkes supposes, that a gentleman likes to have his table well
appointed; but because his own dignity and his wife's credit are
involved in it. The want of this skill is one of the grand evils of
modern life. _From the heiress of the man of rank, to the daughter of
the opulent tradesman, there is no one quality in which young women are
so generally deficient as in domestic economy._ And when I hear learning
contended for on one hand, and modish accomplishments on the other, I
always contend for this intermediate, this valuable, this neglected
quality, so little insisted on, so rarely found, and so indispensably
necessary."

"Besides," said Mr. Carlton, addressing himself to Miss Sparkes, "you
ladies are apt to consider versatility as a mark of genius. She,
therefore, who can do a great thing well, ought to do a small one
better; for, as Lord Bacon well observes, he who can not contract his
mind as well as dilate it, wants one great talent in life."

Miss Sparkes, condescending at length to break a silence which she had
maintained with evident uneasiness, said, "All these plodding
employments cramp the genius, degrade the intellect, depress the
spirits, debase the taste, and clip the wings of imagination. And this
poor, cramped, degraded, stinted, depressed, debased creature is the
very being whom men, men of reputed sense too, commonly prefer to the
mind of large dimensions, soaring fancy, and aspiring tastes."

"Imagination," replied Mr. Stanley, "well directed, is the charm of
life; it gilds every object, and embellishes every scene; but allow me
to say, that where a woman abandons herself to the dominion of this
vagrant faculty it may lead to something worse than a disorderly table;
and the husband may find that the badness of his dinner is not the only
ill consequence of her super-lunary vagaries."

"True enough," said Mr. Flam, who had never been known to be so silent,
or so attentive; "true enough, I have not heard so much sense for a long
time. I am sure 'tis sense, because 'tis exactly my own way of thinking.
There is my Bell now. I have spent seven hundred pounds, and more money,
for her to learn music and whimw