For his daughters expensive foreign governesses are engaged, who teach them the languages, music, and other accomplishments. Or the daughters are sent to some high-priced fashionable school, where they are put through a course of training to enable them to "shine in society." Having reached the age of eighteen, the daughter returns to the parental roof. What does she know in exchange for the large sum of money her education has cost? Usually her penmanship is bad and illegible. Her knowledge of arithmetic very slight. These two essentials of education are not her forte. But she is a good dancer, and perhaps at the assembly or some such function the father's heart has swelled with pride as he noticed how eagerly she was sought as a partner. She can sing French songs, probably those which are rather _risqué_. She can converse, perhaps, in two or three different modern languages. As a general rule her French can scarcely be understood by the foreign _attachés_ at Newport. The girl is absolutely unequipped for _real_ life, and the man of sense, who has passed the boyish age and is looking for a partner for life, knows _this_. Possibly this is one cause why there are comparatively few marriages in our best society. What man is less likely to seek as wife a woman who knows something about the care and value of money? It is strange that a father should be so blinded to the best interests of his daughter. Is it because he considers her intellect so far below that of his son that he makes no effort to instruct her in regard to the care of money? The only thing she knows about money is how to spend it--generally on herself, for clothes and jewels. Perhaps on the first of the month, when the bills for his daughter's extravagance pour in on him, he is vexed; but if his fortune is large, and it is no inconvenience for him to pay them, he generally does so without a murmur. "Let her have a good time while she is young," he soliloquizes. But stop a moment and consider. What you sow you reap is as true in this material concern as in the world of agriculture. The fond parent by his indulgence and neglect is sowing the seeds of extravagance, perhaps those of want. Years hence she may reap the fruit of his ill-judged kindness in fostering habits of reckless expenditure.