Then, too, their own friends, made at school or at the homes of mutual acquaintances, should be welcomed emphatically whenever they like to come. I remember too well feeling much aggrieved at not being able to ask an occasional friend to tea to refuse this privilege. But if the friends become too numerous, it is easy to point out that either you cannot afford such indiscriminate visiting, or to restrict the number of visitors to a certain number; only let it be understood that their friends are always welcome in moderation, and that, though you are delighted to see them, you do not expect them thrown on your hands for entertainment, and that you assume the right to point out to your children the desirability or the reverse of any of their acquaintances, and that you expect them to give due weight to your opinion. It is more than necessary, in my mind, to keep perpetually before one’s children that the home into which they were born is their inheritance that nothing can take from them. And by this I do not mean that I consider a parent bound to provide fortunes for either sons or daughters. I have too often seen the great harm of this to advocate it for one moment; but that they should always not only be welcome there, but claim as a right the shelter and counsel and affection that are their due, no matter what they have done or how grievously they have sinned. For _no_ cause should a father or mother refuse to see their own child, and they should a thousand times more never allow the unmarried daughter to feel herself a burden, whose food and shelter are grudged her, any more than they should continually hint that marriage is a woman’s only destiny, refusing to the girls the ample education lavished on the sons, and so depriving them of every means of making their own living. But grown-up daughters, in my eyes, are a most precious possession, if properly brought up. They at last take some of the heavy burdens a mother has always to bear alone off her shoulders; and if she be moderately intelligent, and has intelligently brought up the girls, there is no reason why they should not be a thousand times more valuable in her eyes than they were as pretty babies and engaging little girls.