you do, which is quite as much to the purpose."

"In the same manner," said my wife, "you will have to give lessons to
your other girl on the washing of silver and the making of beds. Good
servants do not often come to us; they must be made by patience and
training; and if a girl has a good disposition and a reasonable degree
of handiness, and the housekeeper understands her profession, she may
make a good servant out of an indifferent one. Some of my best girls
have been those who came to me directly from the ship, with no
preparation but docility and some natural quickness. The hardest cases
to be managed are not of those who have been taught nothing, but of
those who have been taught wrongly,--who come to you self-opinionated,
with ways that are distasteful to you, and contrary to the genius of
your housekeeping. Such require that their mistress shall understand a
least so much of the actual conduct of affairs as to prove to the
servant that there are better ways than those in which she has hitherto
been trained."

"Don't you think, mamma," said Marianne, "that there has been a sort of
reaction against woman's work in our day? So much has been said of the
higher sphere of woman, and so much has been done to find some better
work for her, that insensibly, I think, almost everybody begins to feel
that it is rather degrading for a woman in good society to be much tied
down to family-affairs."

"Especially," said my wife, "since in these Woman's-Rights Conventions
there is so much indignation expressed at those who would confine her
ideas to the kitchen and nursery."

"There is reason in all things," said I. "Woman's-Rights Conventions are
a protest against many former absurd, unreasonable ideas,--the mere
physical and culinary idea of womanhood as connected only with puddings
and shirt-buttons, the unjust and unequal burdens which the laws of
harsher ages had cast upon the sex. Many of the women connected with
these movements are as superior in everything properly womanly as they
are in exceptional talent and culture. There is no manner of doubt that
the sphere of woman is properly to be enlarged, and that republican
governments in particular are to be saved from corruption and failure
only by allowing to woman this enlarged sphere. Every woman has rights
as a human being first, which belong to no sex, and ought to be as
freely conceded to her as if she were a man,--and first and foremost,
the great right of doing