Ten more precious years of youth, the years of training and of hope, passed by; the different ideal was persistently forced by the parents upon the two, although Fanny, more fortunate than many girls, was, nevertheless, allowed to study her art as well as she could in intervals of housekeeping. On her twenty-third birthday, her father again felt it necessary to check his gifted daughter in her pursuit of her art. He wrote her a letter in which he praised her conduct in the household. "However," he added, "you must still improve. You must become still more steady and collected, and prepare more earnestly and eagerly for your real calling, the _only_ calling of a woman,--I mean the state of a housewife. Women have a difficult task; the constant occupation with apparent trifles, the interception of each drop of rain, that it may not evaporate, but be conducted into the right channel, the unremitting attention to every detail,--all these are the weighty duties of a woman." The time came, at length, for Fanny Mendelssohn to love,--that crisis came which stimulates a man in his work, and nerves him to fresh efforts to make himself successful, that he may be worthy and able to establish a home. But to a woman this brings, only too often, yet another heavy barrier in the way of success in any art or occupation. So it was to Fanny Mendelssohn. "Hensel was at first dreadfully jealous . . . even of Fanny's art. . . . Only _her_ letters have been preserved. With characteristic energy she refuses to sacrifice her brother to the jealousy with which Hensel, in the beginning, regards her love for him, but she consents to give up her friends, and even her music. . . . She never, in her thoughts, loses sight of that letter of her father's, in which he calls the vocation of a housewife the only true aim and study of a young woman, and in thinking of the man of her choice she earnestly devotes herself to this aim." What reprobation and what just indignation would be showered upon a woman who should try to make the man of her choice give up his art, to attend to her private comforts!