still less laborious in any
useful avocation? that they must be always at leisure for the morning
call and the evening _levee_? Nothing, in some circles, would prove so
fatal to a lady's reputation for gentility, as the character of a
working woman. The more idle and dependant on others, the greater the
renown.

And then, too, to be in high repute, one must feign an ignorance of
every kind of employment. To be a good housewife, to understand every
domestic duty, is degrading in the extreme. It is thought a proof of
vulgarity to be acquainted with ordinary things. Pride is taken in
egregious mistakes as to certain persons, places, and pursuits. To show
a knowledge of what is done beyond her own caste would be to forfeit her
rank, and would expel her from the highest circles in society.

How many in the fashionable world conduct as though an excessive
refinement of feeling were the chief praise of their sex. They cannot
witness any spectacle of suffering and pain; it shocks their nerves to
be present with the sick. O how fallen is she from the high station, for
which God created her, who thus shrinks from scenes where the beauty and
glory of her nature may be so nobly displayed! Can it be that an
affected sensibility shall shut one of this sex from the chamber of
sickness? Lives there the man, who commends this wretched
sentimentalism? If there be one such in this land, we devoutly hope that
our soil may soon cease to be polluted by his steps. Let him take
refuge among the nobility of man's fabrication; for God hath denied him
a place among his.

There is but one species of affectation, to be more severely
reprehended, in this connection, than that now considered; it is the
opposite of this, a feigned Insensibility. I once heard a lady, who was
about parting from a circle of most valuable friends, parting too from
her own native spot, on being asked if she did not feel deep regret at
the thought of leaving those scenes, reply, "What good would it do to
cry about it?" The expression might manifest the philosophy of a Stoic,
but a Christian philosophy, I am sure it did not. And a more unfeminine
spirit than it discovered, I have never known in one of her sex. If it
be weak in woman to exhibit great sensibility, it argues no moral
strength, to guard against this by affecting to be a stock, or a stone.
"The haughty woman who can stand alone, and requires no leaning-place in
our heart, loses the spell of her sex."

Anothe